"The thing was madness, madness the more terrible because we could actually do the thing, and I recoiled in horror. The other three, though, driven on by the strange craziness of soul, the monomania, that filled Munson, like him regarded themselves as gods, as life-masters, and agreed to his mad plan. Before I could more than protest, before I could even attempt escape from the island, they had seized me, had prisoned me in this empty storeroom, guarding its windows with metal bars and assuring me that I was only preserved until they might need me for further experimentation. They were mad, Munson and the others, yet it was even to me an explicable madness, for I too had felt the same terrific pride as they at the thought that we had actually created life from the non-living, and that terrific pride it was that had driven them now on their evil plan to become life-masters of all the world. "Swiftly then they went about their work, building up a great condenser many times larger than our small one but similar in design, a great globe-condenser that stands in the center of the clearing there and that took them weeks to complete. Through one of my windows here I watched it growing beneath their hands, while night and day, four burning-eyed madmen, they labored upon it, driven on by Munson's mad purpose of soul. At last, days ago, it was completed, and at once they put it into operation. The great knob-switch, on its switch-board, regulated the wave-length of the etheric vibration it attracted and condensed, I could see. While at the bottom, or at zero, it attracted no vibration, was not in operation. Moved up to the wave-length of the cosmic ray vibrations it attracted those vibrations, drawing them inward from a tremendous region of space to concentrate them in a great sheath of intensified vibrations upon all the earth, penetrating through all its seas. "Already in those seas, I knew, the cosmic ray vibrations, millions of times intensified, would be beginning their work, would be forming great masses of protoplasm in inconceivable quantities out of the inorganic sea-silt's elements. Days more would loose those gigantic tides of death upon the earth, I knew, when they had been developed by the rays to a certain stage, and I raged with despair in my prison while outside the four exultantly watched their work. Striving to escape from my prison, knowing that if I could but smash or turn off the great condenser I might yet prevent the loosing of those protoplasm floods, I worked desperately with the bars of one of my windows. They had been hastily set into the concrete wall with cement, and now with odd bits of metal left to me I chipped and scratched at that cement, endeavoring to loosen one of the bars. But I could do little with it, and one by one the days passed, until I knew that today would see the protoplasm tides rolling out upon earth, knew that by then they would have reached a stage of development and life to enable them to do so.