Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 146 No. 4 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE FIRE PEOPLE. saved him was his ingenious, ready smile, and his retiring, ‘unassuming—almost diffi- dent—manner. At the time of the events I am describing Alan was twenty-two—about two years younger than I. It was his first year out of college. and invended to join his father’s staff. Beth and Alan were twins. I was tre- mendously interested in Beth even then. She seemed one of the most worth-while girls I had ever met. She was a little wisp of femininity, slender and delicate, hardly more than five feet one or two. She had beautiful golden hair and an animated, pret- ty face, with a pert little snub nose. She was a graduate of Vassar, and planned to take up chemistry as a profession, for she had the same scientific bent as her father and brother. T called upon Professor Newland the eve- ning of the day his statement was pub- lished, and found all three discussing it. “You want me to talk for publication, don’t you, Bob Trevor?” the professor asked suddenly, after we had exchanged a few pleasantries. He was a wiry little man, about sixty, smooth-shaven, with sparse gray hair, a rugged face of strong character, and a rest- less air of energy about him. He was an indefatigable worker; indeed, I am confi- dent that, for any single continuous period of work without sleep, he could have run Alan and me into the ground and still have been comparatively fresh. | ‘You want an exclusive follow-up story from me to-night, don’t you?” he repeated. I admitted that I did. : “What you'll get won’t be just what you expect. Look at this.” He pulled one.of the evening papers to- ward him vigorously. humorous. There—read that.” The item to which he pointed was a sprightly account of the weird beings that might shortly arrive from Mercury. “They think it’s a joke—some of them. There’s another—read that.” The attitude of the press was distinctly an inclination to treat the affair from the humorous side. I had seen indications of that during the day at the office. : He had taken a scientific course _ theory—it’s a fact. “They think ‘it is 485 ‘Look here, Bob ”—the professor swept all the papers aside with his hand. “ You put it to them this way. Make them see this is not a prediction of the end of the world. We’ve had those before—nobody pays any attention to them, and rightly so. But this Mercutiam Light is more than a We fought it last No- vember, and we'll have to fight it again next month. That’s what I want to make them realize.” ‘ They’ll think it is worth being serious about,” Alan put in, “if one of those lights drop into Boston or New York—especially if it happens to play in a horizontal direc- tion instead of vertical.” We went into the whole subject thor- oughly, and the professor gave me a second signed statement in which he called upon the nations of the world to prepare for the coming peril. The actual characteristics of the Mercu- tian Light we had discussed before several times. A good deal had been printed about it during the previous December—without, as I have said, .attracting much public at- tention. The two meteors had been ex- amined. They were found to be of a min- eral that could have originated on Mercury. They were burned and pitted like other me- teorites by their passage through the earth’s atmosphere. | Of the light itself Professor Newland had already given his opinion. It was, he said, some unknown form of etheric vibration. It radiated heat very slightly, but it had the peculiarity of generating intense heat in anything it touched directly. ‘You'd better explain that, father,” said Beth, when we reached this point in our summary that evening. “Heat is the vibration of molecules of matter,” the professor began. T nodded. “Make it clear when you write it up, Bob,” Alan put in. “It’s like this. All molecules are in motion—the faster the mo- tion, the hotter the substance, and vice versa.” ‘And this Mercutian Light,” Beth add- ed, “ has the power of enormously increas- ing the molecular vibration of anything it comes in contact with—” . . comicbooks.com