ndoned
everywhere.

Reports of what was happening on Patton Place grew more confused. The
gathering nearby crowds impeded the police and firemen. The Robots, by
ten o'clock, were using a single great beam of dull-red light. It was
two or three feet broad. It came from a spluttering, hissing cylinder
mounted on runners which the Robots dragged along the ground, and the
beam was like that of a great red searchlight. It swung the length of
Patton Place in both directions. It hissed against the houses;
penetrated the open windows which now were all deserted; swept the
front cornices of the roofs, where crowds of tenants and others were
trying to hide. The red beam drove back the ones near the edge, except
those who were stricken by its frigid blast and dropped like plummets
into the street, where the Robots with flashing blades pounced upon
them.

Frigid was the blast of this giant light-beam. The street, wet from
the fire-hose, was soon frozen with ice--ice which increased under the
blast of the beam, and melted in the warm air of the night when the
ray turned away.

From every distant point in the city, awed crowds could see that great
shaft when it occasionally shot upward, to stain the sky with blood.

* * * * *

Dr. Alten by midnight was with the city officials, telling them what
he could of the origin of this calamity. They were a distracted group
indeed! There were a thousand things to do, and frantically they were
giving orders, struggling to cope with conditions so suddenly
unprecedented. A great city, millions of people, plunged into
conditions unfathomable. And every moment growing worse. One calamity
bringing another, in the city, with its myriad diverse activities so
interwoven. Around Alten the clattering, terrifying reports were
surging. He sat there nearly all that night; and near dawn, an
official plane carried him in a flight over the city.

The panics, by midnight, were causing the most deaths. Thousands,
hundreds of thousands, were trying to leave the island. The tube
trains, the subways, the elevateds were jammed. There were riots
without number in them. Ferryboats and bridges were thronged to their
capacity. Downtown Manhattan, fortunately comparatively empty, gave
space to the crowds plunging down from the crowded foreign quarters
bordering Greenwich Village. By dawn it was estimated that five
thousand people had been trampled to death by the panics in various
p