A small white searchlight caught us as the plane passed close over us. I flung back my hood and mask to meet the light. The plane circled, came back, landed on the level gray expanse. In a moment we were with the amazed Dan and Freddie; the precious purple globe was safe on board. The twilight of dawn was silvering our plane as we headed northwest, flying for Miami. CHAPTER XXI A NEST OF VERMIN There are some things which may be pictured by a shuddering imagination. But one does not voluntarily put them into spoken words; certainly they are never printed. History will say that for twenty-four hours, August 14 and 15 of 1957, our earth was swept by a wild insanity. The burning of Cape Town by a maddened mob will be mentioned--the glare of the city against the night sky, the thousands who, bereft of reason, cast themselves with screams into the flames. The wrecking of the two great surface liners, with three thousand lives lost. The major riots of a dozen great cities. The attack by crazed men and women on the Biskra arsenal; the frenzied, half-crazed soldiers who waded heedlessly into the mob, wildly firing; the ten government planes circling over the city whose aviators, crazed by what they saw in the streets and the red madness of the air, firing down with machine guns and then plunging their planes to crash headlong into the crowd. All high lights. History will only hint at the million individual incidents. Marauding, lustful men, breaking by night into dwellings. Lone criminals, crazed into thoughts unspeakable, prowling the dark streets, seeking victims. But the details, the full or the real truth will never be known. They revolt all but an imagination most morbid. The Red Madness of 1957 had best be forgotten. It was late in the afternoon of August 15 before the frantic chemists in the government laboratories at Miami could assemble the purple globe and begin the broadcasting of its healing waves. All that evening they were flung out into the ether. The radio was again working--though badly, because the purple vibrations also interfered with it. The world was assured by radio that the danger was over--the Red Madness in a few hours would be gone. By midnight, August 15, the "ether-plane," as scientists now term it, had regained normality. The current was cut from the purple globe. The world rested, exhausted, bewildered, gazing back stupefied at what it had been through. For hours more, governments, soldiers, police, with sanity come at last, fought sanely with the eddies and backwash of the storm. It wore itself out. Order was restored. There remained the smoking ruins of property destroyed, and the dead, the maimed, and the thousands of poor miserable creatures with reason permanently gone. A single day of the Red Madness! May there never be, on this or any other world, another day such as that!