And now, the thing had passed from the realm of the merely surprising to that of the astounding. For upon the fifth and sixth days had come reports from Dr. Marlin and from the heads of the other observatories of the world that the strange phenomenon was still continuing, that the sun's rotatory speed was still increasing. In each of those two days, it was stated, it had decreased its period of rotation by another 4 hours, the same daily decrease noted previously. And the exactness of this decrease daily, the smoothness of this strange acceleration of the sun's spin, proved that the acceleration could not have been caused by interior disturbances, as had at first been surmised. A great interior disturbance of the sun might indeed cause it to spin suddenly faster, but no such disturbance could be imagined as causing an exact and equal increase in its speed of spin with each succeeding day. What, then, could be the cause? Could it be that in some strange way the universe was suddenly running down? But while Dr. Marlin and his fellow-astronomers discussed this matter of the phenomenon's cause, it was its effects that had begun to claim the attention of the world at large. For that increase of the sun's speed was already making itself felt upon Earth. Even the great storms in the sun's mass, those storms that we call sun-spots, indeed, make themselves felt upon Earth by the intense electrical and magnetic currents of force which they throw forth, causing on Earth electrical storms and auroras and strange weather-changes. And now all the usual phenomena were occurring, but enhanced in intensity. On the third day of the thing, the 6th of May, there occurred over the mid-Atlantic an electrical storm of such terrific power as to all but sweep from the air the great air-liners caught in it, the Constantinople-New York liner and a grain-ship bound from Odessa to Baltimore having been forced down almost to the sea's surface by the terrific air-currents. Great auroras were reported farther south than ever before, and over all our Earth changes in temperature were quick and sudden. And among the other new phenomena called into being, apparently by the sun's increased spin, were the new vibrations discovered at that time by Dr. Robert Whitely, a prominent physicist and a colleague of Dr. Marlin's at North American University.