police just before you came back — they’re sending out ambulance calls from all over the city. Chaugnar has begun to slay—' Algernon had risen and was striding toward the door.
“Wait!” Little’s voice held a note of command. “We’ve got to wait for Imbert. He’s downstairs in the bathroom dressing his wound.”
Reluctantly, Algernon returned into the room.
“A few minutes’ delay won’t matter,” continued Little, his voice surprisingly calm. “We’ve such a hideous ordeal before us that we should be grateful for this respite.”
“But Chaugnar is killing now,” protested Algernon. “And we are sitting here letting more lives…”
“Be snuffed out? Perhaps. But at the same instant all over the world other lives are being snuffed out by diseases which men could prevent if they energetically bestirred themselves.” He drew a deep breath. “We’re doing the best we can, man. This respite is necessary for our nerves’ sake. Try to view the situation sanely. If we are going to eradicate the malignancy which is Chaugnar Faugn we’ll need a surgeon’s calm. We’ve got to steel our wills, extrude from our minds all hysterical considerations, and all sentiment.”
“But it will kill thousands,” protested Algernon. “In the crowded streets…
“No,” Little shook his head. “It’s no longer in the streets. It has left the city.”
“How do you know?”
“There has been a massacre on the Jersey coast — near Asbury Park. I stopped for an instant in the
“Mass hysteria?”
“Yes, they’ll go mad in the city tomorrow — there’ll be a stampede. Unreasoning superstition and blind terror always culminate in acts of violence. Hundreds of people will run amuck, pillage, destroy. There’ll be more lives lost than Chaugnar destroyed tonight.”
“But we can do something. We must.”
“I said that we were merely waiting for Doctor Imbert.” Little crossed to the eastern window and stared for a moment into the lightening sky. Then he returned to where Algernon was standing. “Do you feel better?” he asked. “Have you pulled yourself together?”
“Yes,” muttered Algernon. “I’m quite alright.”
“Good.”
The door opened and Imbert came in. His face was distraught and of a deathly pallor, but a look of relief came into his eyes when they rested on Algernon. “I feared you were seriously hurt,” he cried. “We were quite mad to experiment with — with that thing.”
“We must experiment again, I fear.”
Imbert nodded. “I’m ready to join you. What do you war us to do?”
“I want you and Harris to carry that machine downstairs and put it into my car. I’ll need a flashlight and a few other things. I won’t be long…”
“We must overtake it before it reaches the crossroads,” shouted Little.
They were speeding by the sea, tearing at seventy-miles an hour down a long, white road that twisted and turned between ramparts of sand. On both sides there towered dunes, enormous, majestic, morning stars a-glitter on the dark waters intermittently visible beyond their seaward walls. The horseshoe-shaped isthmus extended for six miles into the sea and then doubled back toward the Jersey coast. At the point where it changed its direction stood a crossroad explicitly sign-posted with two pointing hands. One of these junctions led directly toward the mainland, the other into a dense, ocean-defiled waste, marshy and impregnable, a kind of morass where anything or anyone might hide indefinitely.
And toward this retreat Chaugnar fled. For hours Little's car had pursued it along the tarred and macadamized roads that fringe the Jersey coast — over bridges and viaducts and across wastes of sand, in a straight line from Asbury Park to Atlantic City and then across country and back again to the coast, and now down a thin terrain lashed by Atlantic spray, deserted save for a few ramshackle huts of fishermen and a vast congregation of gulls.
Chaugnar Faugn had moved with unbelievable rapidity, from the instant when they had first encountered it crouching somnolently in the shadows beneath a deserted, bathhouse at Long Branch and had turned the light on it and watched it awake to the moment when it had gone shambling away through the darkness its every movement had been ominous with menace.
Twice it had stopped in the road and waited for them to approach and once its great arm had raised itself against them in a gesture of malignant defiance. And on that occasion only the entropy machine had saved them. Its light Chaugnar could not bear, and when Little had turned the ray upon the creature’s flanks the great obscene body had heaved and shuddered and a ghastly screeching had issued from its bulbous lips. And then forward again it had forged, its thick, stumpy legs moving with the rapidity of pistons — carrying it over the ground so rapidly that the car could not keep pace.
But always its tracks had remained visible, for a phosphorescence streamed from them, illuming its retreat. And always its hoarse bellowing could be heard in the distance, freighted with fury and a hatred incalculable. And by the stench, too, they trailed it, for all the air through which it passed was acridly defiled — pungent with an uncleanliness that evades description.
“It is infinitely old,” cried Little as he maneuvered the car about the base of a sea-lashed dune. “As old as the earth’s crust. Otherwise, it would have crumbled. You saw how the bathhouse crumbled — how the shells beneath its feet dissolved and vanished. It is only its age that saves it.”
“You had the light on it for five minutes,” shouted Algernon. His voice was hoarse with excitement. “And it still lives. What can we do?”
“We must corner it — keep the light directed at it for— many minutes. To send it back we must decrease the random element in it by a billion years. It has remained substantially as it is now for at least that long. Perhaps longer.”
“How many years of earth-time does the machine lop off a minute?” shouted Imbert.
“Can’t tell exactly. It works differently with different objects. Metals, stone, wood all have a different entropy- rhythm. But roughly, it should reverse entropy throughout a billion years of earth-time in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“There it is!” shouted Algernon. “It’s reached the cross-roads. Look!”
Against a windshield glazed with sea mist Imbert laid his forehead, peering with bulging eyes at the form of Chaugnar, phosphorescently illumed a quarter-mile before them on the road, and even as he stared, the distance between the car and the loathsome horror diminished by fifty yards.
“It isn’t moving,” cried Little. He had half risen from his seat and was gripping the wheel as though it were a live thing. “It’s waiting for us. Turn on the light, sir. Quick! for God’s sake! We're almost on top of it!”
Algernon fell upon his knees in the dark and groped about for the switch. The engine’s roar increased as Little stepped furiously upon the accelerator. “The light, quick!” Little almost screamed the words.
Algernon’s fingers found the switch and thrust it sharply upward. There ensued the drone of revolving spheres. “It’s moving again. God, it’s moving!”
Algernon rose shakingly to his feet. “Where is it?” he shouted. “I don’t see it!”
“It’s making for the marshes,” shouted Little. “Look. Straight ahead, through here.” He pointed toward a clear spot in the windshield. Craning hysterically, Algernon described a phosphorescent bulk making off over the narrowest of the bisecting roads.
With a frantic spin of the wheel, Little turned the car about and sent the speedometer soaring. The road grew narrower and more uneven as they advanced along it and the car careened perilously. “Careful.” Algernon called out warningly. “We’ll get ditched. Better slow up.”
“No,” cautioned Little, his voice sharp with alarm. “We can’t stop now.”
The light from the machine was streaming unimpeded into the darkness before them.
“Keep it trained on the road,” shouted Little. “It would destroy a man in an instant.”
