Chapter IV: The Longest Night in History

The lights of the city glowed in long, long rows. The whiter arc-lights on the Jersey side of the Hudson glittered more palely, but all lights shone bright, in the longest night in history. The gigantic electric signs flamed their advertising slogans for the world to admire at three o'clock in the afternoon. The Hudson River day boat came downstream as a glittering mass of lights. Her searchlight shot out and she docked by its rays. There was a deep-toned roaring on the surface of the river. Another. A third. A fourth motor added its roaring hum to the din. Then the four roaring noises swept swiftly across the harbor waves and lifted suddenly, and rose into the darkness that overlay the world. Tiny navigation lights flashed on, and drifted across the empty black sky where sun or moon or stars should have been. They headed out toward Long Island Sound and vanished.

The city, left behind, went valorously on about its business. At three in the afternoon of the day that the sun did not rise, New York was perhaps typical of the whole civilized world. The more savage territories of the planet were sunk in panic, and pagan gods were passionately besought to give back the sun to the world again. In China the shrines were filled with the sounds of gongs and firecrackers. In Soviet Siberia long-neglected chapels resounded to cries of "_Hospodi pomilui!_" Everywhere that men had temples, those temples were swarming masses of terror-stricken suppliants, pleading for the sun to come back again.

But New York was more typical of the more scientifically minded Occident. In one sense the terror was more acute, because New York had had bitter and-repeated experience of Preston and his works. But Hines and Schaaf had said there was no more danger, that Preston had done his worst.

New York had learned, by now, that they knew what they were talking about. Therefore, while there was not complete confidence in their ability to beat Preston again, there was a definite knowledge of the cause of the darkness and a definite idea that the source of the darkness was being attacked. So that New York was frightened but hopeful; terrified, but not panic-stricken because of its belief in Hines and Schaaf.

People in New York, too, had no clear idea of the magnitude of the disaster that impended. As long as artificial light could be used, the average New Yorker considered the matter a nuisance and a cause for alarm, but no immediately dangerous matter.

He read his newspapers avidly, and the statements issued by various scientists consulted by the newspapers struck him as melodramatic in the same way that his newspaper headlines were always melodramatic. But he considered them quite as remote from his own life as his morning torch-fiend narratives.

The darkness was, however, a serious matter enough. Leaving aside the matter of illumination from the sun, the earth was receiving only one-fourth its normal daily supply of solar heat. The layer of darkness intercepted the rest. True, the part of the earth that should have been dark was losing less than its usual nightly amount of heat by radiation into interstellar space, but matters were bad enough anyhow.

The equator was receiving no more heat from the sun than southern Greenland normally receives. New York was receiving less than is normal at the north pole itself. Only the fact that the stored up warmth of the earth's surface layers was being lost very slowly, prevented an immediate drop to below zero temperatures.

But by three o'clock in the afternoon, when the four seaplanes took off for a search of the Maine coast, the official thermometer in the Meteorological Bureau of New York City showed forty-four degrees Fahrenheit--twelve degrees above freezing. The nearness of the ocean with its vast supplies of stored heat had prevented a greater drop.

Inland, the temperature fall was greater yet. A heavy snow was falling in Cleveland. In Butte. Montana, zero had actually been reached. It was not at all difficult to compute a progressive temperature loss which would average twenty degrees a day after the first twenty-four hours, and in one week would make the normally temperate zones uninhabitable and permit of glacier formation in the Panama Canal Zone.

In the face of such figures as this, estimates that two weeks' darkness would destroy all planted crops and cause inescapable famine, seemed hardly worth worrying about. Agricultural experts were pointing out that unless Preston was defeated or his terms met, the world would starve to death. Sunlight is essential to vegetable growth, on which all life depends. But such fears, as a few physicists recognized grimly, were quite needless. Long before that catastrophe came about, mankind would not need to worry about planted crops. Long before the world went hungry, it would have frozen to death.

* * * * *

Schaaf was sunk in a bitter gloom as the four planes roared northward. Big planes, they were. Three Navy bombers, carrying flares and bombs and radio, and the multi-passenger flying transport which carried Hines and Schaaf and an impressive array of apparatus for measurements and photography.

The glow against the black sky, which was New York, faded away against the horizon. Only, there was no horizon. Little pin-pricks of light showed beneath the speeding ships. There were three men in the transport beside Hines and Schaaf. The pilot and his relief, and a radio operator who spoke from time to time to the pilot.

Schaaf saw Hines looking at him and said gloomily, "We are doing radio nafigation. I haff nefer been so helpless; I know more about Breston's apparatus than anybody else in der world--and I do not know der beginning of it! How does he get his wafes into der Heaviside Layer? How does he do it?"

Hines shrugged. His face was a mask, dead white and quite expressionless.

"They must have got Kathryn through," he said irrelevantly. "I had a cordon out that I didn't think a fly could break through. Every road, every bypath covered. There was a destroyer fleet out of Boston, too, to pick up any launch. But they got her through. I don't know how."

Schaaf said helplessly.

"What are we going to do, Hines? Tell me!"

Hines spoke tonelessly, without expression.

"Preston found out his power by accident. At first, I suppose, he merely thought of getting rich by helping out in robberies. But then he found he could manipulate the stock market by turning on the dark. He tried that, and found he could make storms. And now--you know his terms for making the sun shine again?"

"They haff not been made public," growled Schaaf, "and I haff been busy."

"He demands the submission of all the nations of the earth. He is to be Emperor of Earth--or he'll let the earth freeze until the survivors make him their emperor." Hines shrugged. "He has some involved conditions. Every living man to swear allegiance. Some trick arrangement by which he'll always have a corps of his gangsters about a darkness-transmitter somewhere, to keep the world cowed... Of course nobody is thinking of accepting his terms while there's a chance to fight. But there isn't much time."

"If he is on that Metinic Island," growled Schaaf, "we can mass artillery and ships and blow der whole damned thing to bits."

Hines fumbled for a cigar and smiled drearily. "Isn't it funny? Kathryn and I were to have been married to-day, and I'm massing artillery to blow Preston to bits--and she'll be blown to bits with him."

Schaaf swallowed something.

"Hines! _Gott_, Hines, I am sorry!"

"Don't be," said Hines. "I'm going to be on that island when it's destroyed by shell fire. So don't be sorry for me."

* * * * *

The planes flew steadily on through the darkness. Snow swirled about them for a while, and ceased. This was the afternoon of May the fifth. On the earth below, people were gazing hopelessly up at the sky of ebony. All over the world there was despair, as varied in its expression as the people who expressed it.

In Alabama, farmers moved along their cornfield rows with lanterns, watching the young shoots turning black with frost. There was frost as far south as Havana. In the western mountains, dry land farmers motored to the edges of mountain streams that had begun to flow freely. Now they were trickles again, flowing ever more slowly beneath a thickening shell of ice.

Men cursed the black sky that would not let the sun's warmth through. There was beach ice on the Great Lakes. A borax prospector in Death Valley saw by a thick miner's candle that there was a deposit of hoar frost even in that unbelievable place.

Everywhere human beings began to realize that darkness was not the worst of the evils upon them. The world was growing colder and ever colder beneath its sky of black. It was a dark world whose inky obscurity was broken only by the tiny yellow flames where yet hoping or desperately enduring people comforted themselves by the light it seemed would never come down from the sky again.

But the wild things had no comfort. Those creatures of the night which prey on others, at first moved freely. Bats soared in their erratic fashion until the increasing cold set them hunting their caves again. Owls swept abroad on noiseless wings. And some--not many--of the four-footed animals crawled or crept or slithered upon their private businesses.

But the other things lay hidden. Songbirds crouched in their nests while the night hung on interminably and the air grew icy. Little nestlings roused and chirped querulously from hunger. But night still remained. The age-old instincts, bred of terror, held the old birds still, though their young ones starved. And besides, to have left the nests after the cold increased would be to let the featherless young ones freeze.

There were very many small, bewildered tragedies in woods and forests and jungles while the darkness held.

* * * * *

Four planes roared on, ever northward, in their quest of the island where Preston had his stronghold. Gradually, the three bombers dropped down toward the earth. Gradually, the transport plane climbed. And then a signal came by radio. Schaaf grew tense and watchful. Hines grew grim and still, staring at the world of darkness all below. And then, quite suddenly, there was a vast, blinding glare below. A bomber had dropped a flare.

The sky above remained like ebony. The sea remained like ink. But there was a line of surf upon the sea, and an enormous glare beneath a swaying parachute, and three huge bombing planes in silhouette against a world all black and white.

Hines stared downward through powerful binoculars, focusing them quite calmly on the land beyond the surf.

"I see a man--two men, running," he said steadily.

The first ball of fire was dropping swiftly. A second bloomed suddenly, farther on. An island was made clearly visible. An irregular, jagged shape, outlined by surf, with here and there a streak of white sand. Schaaf put his glasses to his eyes, and the earth seemed to leap toward him. Low, squat structures of a curiously ungainly form. A bowl-shaped apparatus ten feet or more across, made of wires which glittered in the unbearable light. And one other, incredible thing...

Schaaf blinked, and swore, and then shouted.

"I haff it!"

From the enter of the island a column of solid, jetty black reared upward toward the sky. It was opaque, solid-seeming, and utterly black. It looked like the drooping tentacle of some colossal waterspout, anchored and moored. It looked like a throbbing hose through which darkness was being pumped upward to discolor the sky.

Schaaf babbled.

"Four-centimeter wafes! He has got der four-centimeter wafes! Oh, der clefer scoundrel! Der _verdammt_ clefer scoundrel!"

On the island three men were running toward the bowl-shaped apparatus of wires. A third flare blazed vividly. In the big ship seven thousand feet up the aircraft camera clicked steadily, exposing plates and changing them and exposing more. The radio operator was working his key feverishly.

The three bombing planes circled and soared over the island. A fourth flare filled the world with light. And suddenly one of the monster flying things down below wheeled in its flight and dived savagely.

"Difing for der blackness-beam!" panted Schaaf. "Difing--"

Three men were working frantically about the bowl-shaped apparatus on the ground. The giant bomber showed clearly for an instant, as if poised before its suicidal dash against the apparently solid column of blackness reaching upward to the sky. It shot into that blackness--

The sky split open!

From horizon to horizon lurid flames flashed into being. The sea and the island and all the world was lit by an unbearable, a terrific glare. It seemed as if all the world were being destroyed in one vast explosion, the steam and fumes of which had already mounted colossally toward the zenith.

* * * * *

But there was no blast of sound. The sky closed once more. There was utter silence save for the loud droning of the motors outside the cabin of the big plane. Far below, three magnesium flares glittered brightly.

"Gawd!" said the radio operator, awed, "What was that?"

Hines said dryly: "That was daylight, my friend. The sunlight and clouds. That was what we expect to see for twelve hours every day."

Schaaf was muttering, while he rubbed his light-dazed eyes: "There was four thousand kilowatts in that beam. What happened?"

He peered down again. There was a sudden flaring upward of lurid yellow flames. The bomber that had dived into the darkness-beam had crashed, now, and was burning fiercely on a narrow beach.

"Get der other ships away!" snapped Schaaf suddenly. "Recall them! And we haff to go like der deffil! Quick!"

But he was too late. The bowl-shaped contrivance of glittering wires moved suddenly. A beam of blackness shot out from it. That blackness swept upward and enveloped a burning flare. The flare went out. The beam of darkness swept on, and the flare was a dripping, swiftly falling mass of tiny yellow sparks. The beam swung sharply to one of the two remaining bombers. The plane dived and dodged, but the darkness caught it, enveloped it. The bomber dropped crazily out of the blackness, spitting sparks and burning. It crashed into the sea.

The third bomber was racing for safety. The beam shot toward it, and when it careened wildly to escape, expanded widely. It became an apparently solid object a hundred yards across. It closed over the bomber, and there was a terrific explosion. When the beam died away there was no falling, burning wreck. There was only a rain of small particles of debris.

"Go like der deffil!" snapped Schaaf. "Cut off der motors and glide! We haff to carry der news back. And for der lofe of Gott, do not use der radio! He will pick it up and we are geflooey!"