what does it mean? It's uncanny!"He sat down again, wearily. There were lines of age and care on his lean face that I had never seen before. But even in the dull red light, there was still energy and determination in it."I've never told you, Mel, but ever since the radio brought you your dream of the Green Girl, I have been working--building delicate apparatus and exploring the ether. And I found a strange force at work--a force that is battling to control the ether! For fifteen years I have known that it was working _to freeze the earth_!""To freeze the earth!""It seems so. What it is is a mystery, whose solution has resisted all my efforts. I can hardly conceive a reason for it. But I know that something is at work to cut us off from the sun! You know that light waves of different phases and the same frequency interfere, with mutual extinction--the diffraction grating is based on that fact. And interfering waves have been setting up such a disturbance in the ether about the earth as will ultimately cut off the sun's radiation! The principles of it are a bit abstruse. Even now, of course, the effect is only partially complete. In fact, the red and infra-red rays carry most of the sun's heat.""Then there's no immediate danger?""No man knows at what moment the force may be synchronized. When it is, within a short time the temperature of the earth will fall to absolute zero. And even as it is, life could not go on long under this red pall, for all life depends upon the actinic rays in the ultra-violet spectrum.""And you have kept a thing like this to yourself for years!""It would have done the world no good to know that any day might be its last. I have spared no efforts to find means of averting the catastrophe. And it has been terrible to know. Every day that I have walked among our trees, or listened to the birds, or watched the wonder of the sea, I have known that in a day it might all be frozen death!""But you say there is a chance? There's something you can do to save the earth?""I've built a machine to broadcast vibrations to interfere with that other force. It will upset it--I hope!--for perhaps a few days. But think, Mel, what it means! Think of the vastness of the power that would be able to cut off the sun! Earth--mankind--would mean nothing to it! It would soon get around my interference! I must save my machine for the last emergency!"

CHAPTER IV
The Amazing Night

The only difference between red and blue light is that the waves of the red are about twice as long as the others. There must have been a sort of screen in the ether that somehow intercepted all but a narrow band of frequencies in the red, the other wave-lengths being either canceled or 

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