The Man Who Saved the Earth
We read of the days when the powers of radium were yet unknown. It istold us that burns were produced by incautiously carrying a tube ofradium salts in the pocket. And here in this story we are told of adifferent power, opalescence, due to another element. It can destroymountains, excavate cavities of immeasurable depths and kill humanbeings and animals in multitude. The story opens with a poor littleboy experimenting with a burning glass. Then he becomes the hero ofthe story—he studies and eventually finds himself able to destroy theearth. He exceeds Archimedes in his power. And he suddenly finds thathe has unlocked a power that threatens this very destruction. And thestory depicts his horror at the Frankenstein which he had unloosed,and tells of his wild efforts to save humanity, and of the loss of thecosmic discoveries of the little newsboy grown up to be a greatscientist.
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING
Even the beginning. From the start the whole thing has the precisionof machine work. Fate and its working—and the wonderful Providencewhich watches over Man and his future. The whole thing unerring: theincident, the work, the calamity, and the martyr. In the retrospect ofdisaster we may all of us grow strong in wisdom. Let us go intohistory.
A hot July day. A sun of scant pity, and a staggering street; pantingthousands dragging along, hatless; fans and parasols; the sultryvengeance of a real day of summer. A day of bursting tires; hotpavements, and wrecked endeavor, heartaches for the seashore, forleafy bowers beside rippling water, a day of broken hopes and listlessambition.
Perhaps Fate chose the day because of its heat and because of itsnatural benefit on fecundity. We have no way of knowing. But we doknow this: the date, the time, the meeting; the boy with the burningglass and the old doctor. So commonplace, so trivial and hidden inobscurity! Who would have guessed it? Yet it is—after the creation—oneof the most important dates in the world’s history.
This is saying a whole lot. Let us go into it and see what it amountsto. Let us trace the thing out in history, weigh it up and balance itwith sequence.
Of Charley Huyck we know nothing up to this day. It is a thing which,for some reason, he has always kept hidden. Recent investigation as tohis previous life and antecedents have availed us nothing. Perhaps hecould have told us; but as he has gone down as the world’s greatmartyr, there is no hope of gaining from his lips what we would solike to know.
After all, it does not