Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 1 (1926-01).djvu/137

Rh 

 manner of his ultimate passing was the big question.

At the home of the judge a cordon of police guarded the house and grounds. Inside the house there were a few men—police officials, close friends, and a few relatives, together with Sanders and myself from the press. The judge sat with his son in another room as night drew on. They were conversing in low tones, distinctly audible to us out in the library.

Despite their nervous strain they seemed quite calm. After a time—at about 9 o'clock—the son made his father lie down on the couch. Perhaps an hour later, when the judge seemed to be dozing, the son came to the door for a moment and spoke.

"I am going to close this door," he said. "There is going to be fought in this room tonight, if I am correct in my surmise, a terrible battle. It will be a battle of good against evil; right against wrong. I feel that it will be better for us to fight this out alone. Weapons will not avail; only the strategy of a clean brain. Whether or not my brain will prove capable to cope with the situation we shall soon learn."

He went into the room and closed the door behind him. We sat out there in the library in absolute horror for perhaps two hours. What was going on behind that door? What? The minutes dragged. We had conversed now and again in low tones, but there was about our conversation a pathetic lack of force. It was lifeless, dead.

Midnight!

From beyond the door came the wail of a soul in torment. Came a cry of sheer horror from the the throat

The country lay in the grip of a great terror—the President of the United States was meeting with Congress to combat the dread unseen enemy—a Voice in the Radio had shown its power to dissolve buildings by radio through an etheric wave-force that stopped the rotation of the electrons in the atoms and caused matter to disappear—he had threatened to turn the Capitol, and Congress, and the President, into a puff of red dust. What happened is described in this unusual, powerful and fascinating story.

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