As I got up awkwardly, stretching my tired limbs, he climbed on his stool before the complex array of instruments on the wall, and began to manipulate the switches and dials. "I have just to pick up their vibrations and synchronize mine with them," he said in a voice dull with fatigue. "In five minutes we will know. With these instruments I can pick up and analyze any disturbance in the ether, whether it be Hertzian or wireless wave two miles long, or any of the shorter waves that extend down to heat or infra-red, through the visible and ultra-violet spectrums, and even below, to the Cosmic Rays. I can pick up vibrations that other scientists have merely reasoned ought to exist! I will analyze the force that is being used, and then put my vibrations against it. I hope to set up an effective interference, temporarily, at least." In two minutes I was standing out of doors, with a rug about my shoulders, in a blackness that was almost palpable. The bitter wind still blew a little, but the rain had stopped. The ground was frozen, and a light fall of snow crunched underfoot. Drawing the rug close about me, I groped my shivering way to the front of the yard, thinking of the misery and death that the cold must already have brought to earth, realizing, for the first time, how dependent human welfare is on the whims of nature. For a few minutes I waited in the frozen darkness, and nothing happened. Then began a fantastic thing, a veritable storm in the ether! A faint living light of violet--blessed dawn of reborn day!--came in the south; thin misty streamers of violet flame flashed through the unutterable midnight of the heavens! Violet fire flickered and burned in a pale and nebulous aurora that ran with lightning speed to the four corners of the heavens! It danced, it wavered, it marched in gleaming pointed lances of pulsing flame! And then the violet became a ubiquitous lucent background for a weirdly glorious and terrible play of bright, coruscating tongues of polychromatic fire! Suddenly a great blade of vivid, flaming green cut through the glowing violet, flashed across the sky in amazing splendor, and burst into a hundred blazing globes of brilliant emerald, that rolled down misty tracks of flame to the horizon! A flickering, many-tongued sheet of amber was born in the east, spread over the violet haze throughout the heavens, and died into a pale saffron sheet that slowly changed and warmed to a rich glow of rosy mist. And from it grew a flickering wall of serpent tongues of orange, and scarlet, and blue, that danced and spread, and wove themselves into a curious crown of throbbing flame at the zenith.