We came back in June, chasing the daylight, and located in Porto Rico. Dan and his father were engaging in the new agriculture. The daylight and twilight months in the West Indies were found favorable for the raising of vegetables. Every one was groping. What could or could not be done was as yet scarcely known. But it promised to be a profitable business. Food of any kind, anywhere in the world, at any time, found a ready market. All the world governments were engaged in its purchase, its storage, and its distribution. A new era was beginning; and in it some saw a more rational order than in the old. I am no economist; yet now I could see quite clearly the fallacy of much that the world had previously thought was best. Tariff walls between the nations were gone now. The world in its necessity became one big family, working to maintain itself as best it could. In the daylight in Porto Rico, we were raising vegetables to feed the people who were living in the darkness and cold of the south. Six months later, they would be doing the same for us. It is not my purpose to indulge in economic theories here, though Dan and I often discussed them. Freddie was not interested. We wanted him with us; but though he came to Porto Rico, he stayed in San Juan, often going up to Miami. The National Capital was still there; and Freddie had interested the government in his invention. The world catastrophe had brought a great stimulus to scientific invention. New devices, born of the necessity of totally new world conditions, were being developed. Every government was ready to help with funds. Freddie had perfected his motor, financed by our government. More important than that, however, they were interested in producing his heat-ray projector in more powerful form. His new projector, he told us, was very nearly ready. Not for war purposes, of course. With characteristic thoughtlessness, the world had already almost forgotten the brief invasion from Xenephrene. Such a thing as that naturally could never happen again. And after what the world had been through, war between our own races was unthinkable. Freddie's heat-ray, he said, would be used in the six months' Night against the cold. It had a myriad uses. With it, a ship might blaze a path down a frozen river. Water power might be utilized further into the long Night; why, a city might even be sprayed with its beams and be kept spring-like despite the cold! Visions! But by such visions science moves ahead into the realism of achievement! That long Night of '55 and '56 Dan and I spent housed in, with the comparative comfort of our newly rebuilt and heated plantation house. Throughout January and February it snowed heavily; the tumbled little mountains of Porto Rico were solid white.