Sinister Barrier (11 page)

For example: February, 1938—Colored light seen sailing high over Douglas, Isle of Man. November, 1937—Fall of a tremendous ball of light frightened inhabitants of Donaghadee, Ireland, other, smaller balls of light being seen floating in the air at the same time. May, 1937—Disastrous end of German transatlantic airship 
Hindenburg
 attributed to “St. Elmo’s fire.” The scientists tied a tag on this mysterious phenomena—and went back to their slumbers. July, 1937—Chatham, Massachusetts, station of the Radiomarine Corporation reported a message from the British freighter 
Togimo,
 relayed by the American vessel 
Scanmail,
 saying that mysterious colored lights had been sighted five hundred miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland.

New York Times,
 January 8, 1937—Scientists, fed up counting sheep, produced a new theory to explain the blue lights and “similar electric phenomena” frequently seen near Khartoum, Sudan, and Kano, Nigeria.

Reynolds News
 (Britain), May 29, 1938—Nine men were injured by a mysterious something that dropped from the sky. One of them, a Mr. J. Hurn, described it as “like a ball of fire.” 
Daily Telegraph,
 February 8, 1938—Glowing spheres were reported to have been seen by many readers during an exceptional display of the Aurora Borealis, itself a rare sight in England. 
Western Mail
 (Wales), May, 1933—Balls of phosphorescence observed gliding over Lake Bala, mid-Wales. 
Los Angeles Examiner,
 September 7, 1935—Something described as a “freak lightning bolt” fell in bright sunlight at Centerville, Maryland, hurled a man from a chair and set fire to a table.

Liverpool Echo
 (Britain), July 14, 1938—What witnesses described as “a big blue light” invaded Number Three Pit, Bold Colliery, St. Helens, Lancashire, contacted lurking gases and caused “a mystery explosion.” Blue lights that caused no blips on watching radar scopes caused air-raid sirens to be sounded in Northern Ireland, and fighter-interceptors roared upward, January 17, 1942. No bombs dropped, nothing was shot down. The news was suppressed in the papers and the Germans were suspected of some new devilment. Four months earlier Berlin’s guns had blasted at “navigation lights” when no planes were over.

Sydney Herald
 and 
Melbourne Leader
 had made astonishingly lavish reports on glowing spheres, or fireballs, which for unknown reasons had infested Australia throughout the year 1905, especially in the months of February and November. Eerie conventions had been held in the Antipodes. Veterans of World Slaughter had conferred, sky-high. One such phenomenon, seen by Adelaide Observatory, moved so slowly that it was watched for four minutes before it vanished. 
Bulletin of the French Astronomical Society,
 October, 1905—Strange, luminous phenomena seen lurking around Calabria, Italy. The same kind of phenomena, in the same area, had been reported in September, 1934, by 
Il Popolo a’Italia.

Someone found an ancient and tattered copy of 
The Cruise Of The Bacchante
 in which King George the Fifth, then a young prince, described a strange string of floating lights, “as if of a phantom vessel all aglow,” seen by twelve members of the 
Bacchante’s
 crew at four o’clock in the morning of June 11, 1881.

Daily Express
 (Britain), February 15, 1923—Brilliant luminosities were seen in Warwickshire, England. 
Literary Digest,
 November 17, 1925—Similar luminosities seen in North Carolina. 
Field,
 January 11, 1908—Luminous “things” in Norfolk, England. 
Dagbladet,
 January 17, 1936—Will-o’-the-wisps in southern Denmark, hundreds of them. Scientists sought onion blight at twenty thousand feet, but not one pursued a will-o’-the-wisp. It wasn’t their fault; like all saints and sinners, they went where Viton-inspired to go. 
Peterborough Advertiser
 (Britain), March 27, 1909—Queer lights in the sky over Peterborough. Over following dates, the 
Daily Mail
 confirmed this report, and added others from places farther away. Something emotional might have been happening in Peterborough in March, 1909, but no paper published anything correlative as between human and Viton activities… though there are human functions which are not news.

Daily Mail
 (Britain), December 24, 1912, ran an article by the Earl of Erne describing brilliant luminosities that had appeared “for seven or eight years” near Lough Erne, Ireland. The things that started Belfast’s sirens wailing, in 1942, soared from the direction of Lough Erne, Ireland. 
Berliner Tageblatt,
 March 21, 1880,—“A veritable horde” of floating luminosities were seen at Kattenau, Germany. In the same century, glowing spheres were reported from dozens of places as far apart as French Senegal, the Florida Everglades, Carolina, Malaysia, Australia, Italy and England.

Journalistically enjoying itself, the 
Herald-Tribune
 went to town by issuing a special edition containing twenty thousand references to luminosities and glowing spheres culled from four hundred issues of 
Doubt.
 For good measure, it added a parallel-beam photographed copy of Webb’s jottings, publishing them with the editorial opinion that this scientist had been working along the right lines prior to his death. In the light of recently acquired knowledge, who could say how many schizophrenics were really unbalanced, how many were the victims of Viton meddling, or how many were normal people fortuitously endowed with abnormal vision?

“Were all those second-sighters as simple as we thought?” demanded the 
Herald-Tribune,
 paraphrasing Webb. “Or was it that they could scan frequencies just beyond the reach of most of us?”

Then followed more quotations resurrected from the past. The case of a goat that pursued nothingness across a field, then dropped dead. The case of a herd of cattle that suddenly went mad with fear, and raced around a meadow obligingly sweating their emotions into empty air. Hysteria on a turkey ranch when eleven thousand gobblers went nuts in ten minutes… thus providing unseen travellers with a snack. Forty-five cases of dogs that howled piteously, put their tails between their legs and belly-crawled away—from nothing! Cases of contagious insanity in dogs and cattle, “too numerous to list,” but all of them proof—asserted the 
Herald-Tribune—
that animal eyes functioned differently from all but those of a minority of human beings.

The public absorbed every word of this, wondered, feared, trembled in the night hours and by day. White-faced, jittery mobs raided the drugstores, snatched up supplies of Bjornsen’s formula as fast as they became available. Thousands, millions treated themselves according to instructions, saw the facts in all their hellish actuality, had their few shreds of doubt torn away.

In Preston, England, nobody perceived anything abnormal—until it was found that the local atomic-defence chemical plant had substituted toluidine blue for methylene blue. In Yugoslavia, a Professor Zingerson, of Belgrade University, dutifully treated himself with iodine, methylene blue and mescal, peered myopically at the sky and saw no more than he’d seen since birth. He said as much in a bitingly sarcastic article published in the Italian 
Domenica del Corriere.
 Two days later a globe-trotting American scientist persuaded the paper to print his letter suggesting that the good professor either take off his lead-glass spectacles or substitute ones with lenses made of fluorite. Nothing more was heard from the absent-minded Yugoslavian.

Meanwhile, in the west of America, monster tanks made tentative thrusts and occasional forays across the fighting line, clashed, blew each other into metal splinters. High-speed strat-planes, gun-spotting helicopters, highly streamlined helldivers and robot bombs criss-crossed the skies of California, Oregon and militarily important points east. Neither side yet made use of atomic explosives, each hesitant about starting a process beyond human power to end. Basically, the war followed the pattern of earlier and equally or less bloody wars: despite improved techniques, automatic and robotic weapons, despite development of armed conflict to a push-button affair, the ordinary soldier, the common foot-slogger remained supreme. The Asians had ten for the other side’s one, and were breeding ahead of their losses.

Distance shrank even more after a further month of battle when supersonic rockets joined the fray. High out of sight and far beyond sound, they streaked both ways across the Rockies, mostly missing their intended targets, yet still striking ferociously at tightly packed haunts of humanity. A ten-mile miss at one, two or three thousand miles range was mighty good shooting. All the way from Bermuda to Llasa, any place became liable to erupt skyward at any time, the noise following afterward.

So the skies flamed and glowed and spewed death with dreadful impartiality while men of all creeds and colors moved through their last minutes and final hours protected mentally by hope of survival and lack of knowledge of what awaited them at the next stroke of the clock. Heaven and earth had combined to create hell. The common people bore it with the animal fatalism of the lower orders, seeing with eyes more understanding than of yore, constantly conscious of a menace more invincible, more revolting than anything born of their own shape and form.