"It would have done the world no good to know that any day might be its last. I have spared no efforts to find means of averting the catastrophe. And it has been terrible to know. Every day that I have walked among our trees, or listened to the birds, or watched the wonder of the sea, I have known that in a day it might all be frozen death!" "But you say there is a chance? There's something you can do to save the earth?" "I've built a machine to broadcast vibrations to interfere with that other force. It will upset it--I hope!--for perhaps a few days. But think, Mel, what it means! Think of the vastness of the power that would be able to cut off the sun! Earth--mankind--would mean nothing to it! It would soon get around my interference! I must save my machine for the last emergency!" CHAPTER IV The Amazing Night The only difference between red and blue light is that the waves of the red are about twice as long as the others. There must have been a sort of screen in the ether that somehow intercepted all but a narrow band of frequencies in the red, the other wave-lengths being either canceled or converted into vibrations too long or too short to be perceptible. If there was such a screen, it was slowly altered, so that the lengths of the penetrating waves became shorter and shorter. In other words, the color of the sky slowly ran through all the colors of the spectrum toward the blue! The sun changed from a vast round blood-ruby to a blazing yellow diamond, flooding the earth with a sodium light! To an emerald, huge and supernally bright, coloring the sea and the sky with a dim and ghastly green radiance! The green melted into a cold and awful blue! The frozen sapphire slowly turned violet! And the violet sun grew soft and dim--and dim--until it went out utterly! The heavens were black at midday! The sky was an empty, illimitable chasm of darkness! The night was almost tangible--it seemed to have an oppressive weight. It was blacker than any photographer's darkroom. Trees, cottage, sounding sea, had vanished! It made no difference to close my eyes, or to put my hand before them. A great dizziness came over me, and I groped blindly for the post of the veranda, and clung to it helplessly when I found it. The sounds that came to me were oddly reassuring. The rustle of the wind in the palms, and the plaintive chirp of a few birds in the unseen trees, and the dull, ceaseless rumble of the waves. Then I heard a heavy sigh from Sam, and the scraping of his shoe on the floor. Then a match scratched, and a pitiful little yellow flame lit the veranda, showing Sam's lean, earnest face very clearly against the wall of night. "Thank God we can see it burn!" he muttered. "If they had exhausted the ether here, the jig would have been up with my electrical machinery." "They! Lord! Do you think somebody--"