Wotherspoon and I recovered almost simultaneously; and on comparing notes--which was difficult at first owing to our being temporarily deaf--we found that neither of us had suffered any serious injury. A few slight cuts with flying glass were apparently the worst of the damage which we had sustained. There was a sharp tang in the air of the room which made us cough for some time until it cleared away; but whatever the gas may have been, it left no permanent effects on us. When we had procured lights and pulled ourselves together sufficiently to make a fuller examination of the room, we began to appreciate the extent of the damage and to congratulate ourselves still more upon the escape which we had had. The whole place was littered with fragments of furniture. The incubators had been shattered; and their contents, smashed into countless fragments, lay all over the floor. But it was on the bench at the window that the full force of the fire-ball had spent itself. There was hardly anything recognisable in the heap of debris. The wooden planks had been torn and broken with tremendous force. The little balcony was filled with sticks which had been thrown outward by the explosion; and, as we found afterwards, a good deal of material had been projected half-way across the road. Of the denitrifying bacteria cultures or their cases there was hardly a trace, except a few tiny splinters of glass. I did not wait much longer with Wotherspoon; for, to tell the truth, my nerves were badly shaken by my experiences. I got him to come downstairs with me and we had a stiff glass of brandy each; and then I telephoned for a taxi to take me home. My own car was standing at the door; but I did not trust my ability to drive it in traffic at that moment. It seemed better to send my man round for it after I got home. I went back in the taxi, with my nerves on edge. CHAPTER II The Coming of “The Blight” Next morning I still felt the effects of the shock; and decided not to go to my office. I stayed indoors all day. When the evening papers came, I found in them brief accounts of the fire-ball; and in one case there was an article by Wotherspoon under the heading: “Well-known Scientist’s Strange Experience.” One or two reporters called at my house later in the day in search of copy, but I sent them on to Cumberland Terrace. In some of the reports I figured as “a well-known motor manufacturer,” whilst in others I was referred to simply as “a friend of Mr. Wotherspoon.” I had little difficulty in surmising the authorship of the latter group. In the ordinary course of events, the fire-ball would have been much less than a nine days’ wonder, even in spite of Wotherspoon’s industry in compiling accounts of it and digging out parallel cases from the correspondence columns of old volumes of _Nature_ and _Knowledge_; actually its career as a news item was made briefer still. An entirely different phenomenon shouldered it out of the limelight almost immediately.