Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/50

Rh with safety valves recklessly weighted, they hurt through the dying masses at the entrance to the channel and steamed into the scarlet stretch of the already dead growths.

Other craft were close behind, and before the channel closed again, through the blind surge of the immense pressure from the open see, a score of great vessels had run the gauntlet and drawn in to the docks, where for days thousands of men had striven to clear the huge ridge of putrifying things which were piled twenty feet high on the wharves; and in a little the plogue could be seen working mong this fresh inpouring and spreading rapidly in the great belt outside.

'At once the news was flashed to every center of the civilized world, and the Gexpair and chaos of the nations was changed in a moment to a delirium of lation, and sireraft by the hundred wore madly driven at undreamt of 'speeds, transporting the precious little Packages of infection in every direction, A little lator, in scores of ports, great 'vessels hurled their thousands of tons at full speed into the stricken things. Many found themselves surrounded by the myriads not yet affected and were overwhelmed by them even as those doomed ships of weeks before had been,

But the individual no longer weighed in the balanoo when overy minute was Priceless; everywhere vessels staggered through the drift and brought life and hope to the starving millions; and everywhere the deadly little bacilli were spreading and speeding like a forest fire through the enormous mass of alien life, changing it in a few short hours to mere putrifying seum,

And thus pasved the most terrible ménace which man so for hae. striven with, He triumphed, but the margin between him and total extinction had been well-nigh imperceptible: As it was, before winter had set in the Phosphorens hhad practically completed its deadly 'work, and only in a few secluded islands did the marine growths linger. On land, too, it was shortly discovered that the smo ally was as virulent an enemy of the terrestrial types mx it was to the 'maring, and the remmauts left by the preceding cold sap were quickly exterminated, for now the whole world was centered on this business, and nations needed neither treaties or commissions to render aid wherever it was required,

Though there could be little doubt but there would be sudden outbreaks of these fearful things for many years to come, yet man had the essurance that now he hid a weapon capable of overcoming the menace of their marvelous vitality and stupendous power of propagation, 'That such a huge volume of decay could encompass our coasts and lay the land under the blight of its fearful stench, 'without most serious results ensuing, was not possible, 'The reck of that filthy, putrifying multitude was beyond words.

While in no manner similar to the stench of decay we awociate with the process, yet it possessed an irritant and sickening quality many times more distressing and incredibly penetrating. 'There was no escaping it; it hung over the Iand and water as an almost visible pall and tainted every serap of food and drop of water with {ts nauseating properties, That sickness should sweep the 'world was inevitable, and, considering the low ebb of vitality then prevalent, it was nothing short of a miracle thut the toll of life was no more, A mere five per cent of the European population— on the American side the mortality was considerably less—fell a prey to what 'became commonly known as the 'Green Rot."" That it was @ hitherto unknown variety of plague was the sole explanation the masses evor astimilated. 'The symptoms were the appearance of greenish blotches upon the abdomen and ches these rapidly spread and became decomposed areas of rotting flesh, boring like ulcers into the vital organs and causing intense agony.

A great variance in the wasceptibility of individuals to its virulence was the most extraordinary feature of the aoeurrenee, Many expired within a few hours, practically rotted masses of corruption. Others suffered a little space in. great agony, then the symptoms abated, and in a few days the patient was as sound as ever. Tf ons survived twenty-four hours recovery was asmured; no more 'than this fact was ever definitely agreed 'upon, and np antidote was discovered, However, like all human ills, this strange visitation ran its course and passed away. Winter and the ceaseless 'violent gales which sweep the northern 'seas at that season int the course of time dispersed the slime and corruption from the water and the great wall of death which had encompassed thousands of miles of coastline from the Mediterranean to the Aretic, so that by the spring naught remained of all that enormous hhost save the memory that time itself could never efface.

It was a humbled aud sobgred humenity that emerged from the ordeal. The proud conceit of their vaunted progress no longer swayed the nations, and man forgot his former dream of some future day sealing the gulf which separates him from the neighboring heavenly bodies, Rather was there a dread that the inhabitants of these worlds might again, through a similar mischance, leap that gulf and arrive to wreak thelr mereiless will upon our planet, The old order of assured dominance and pride of the stability and seourity of the species had heen sbattered, and humanity beeame more reverent and humble,

The antagonisms of raee, so fiercely maintained in former days, were largely obliterated by the realization that, faced by a common foe, boundary lines and commercial jealousies had ina twinkling vanished, and'mankind awoke to the fact that North, South, Fast and West, the human race was but a single family {isolated in the immensity of creation. A truer sense of proportion came to tho world, and the insanity of slaying one's neighbor, who might well tomorrow be one's salvation, was born upon all men. Not that bickerings, or wars, ceaséd, but anger Was neither so hasty orprolonged, 'and the intense bitterness toward an opponent, which had previously swept the 'entire world into a mad carnival of murder, wos now an impossibility. As in the mass, 20 in the individual, the mental outlook had undergone a radieal change.

'One likes to think of Batson deserting his desk and invertebrate existence for the whirr of a Cyclopean lathe, which daily in his hands gave to the world a lasting monument of the fact that once a living man had fulfilled the object of his being and left his fellows the richer for his presence.

THE END