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Shrieks of the doomed had never stopped from the moment the Vandercook building had started its mad journey aloft. Jeter whirled on Hadley. "Will you see that all my suggestions are carried out, Hadley?" he demanded. Hadley, face gray as ashes, nodded. From Manhattan rose the long abysmal wailing of a populace just finding its voice of fear after a stunning, numbing catastrophe.
The Vandercook building, the twelve-story building whose lights Jeter had seen moving, was rising bodily, straight out of the well which had been built around it. From the building came shrieks and cries of mortal terror. Even as the conference froze to horrified immobility, many men and women stepped to the ledges of those darkened windows and plunged out in their fear. "God!" said Hadley.
They seemed to think Jeter had taken leave of his senses, and yet all had seen the Vandercook building perform the utterly impossible. Hadley nodded. "What do you want with the filers and others at your laboratory?" "To listen to the details of construction of our space ship. Eyer will hold a couple of classes to explain everything.
In ten minutes Manhattan was a darkened, silent city ... and now the conference could see why Jeter had asked for all lights to be extinguished. Five thousand feet aloft, directly over the Hudson River, the Vandercook building now hung motionless and all eyes saw the thin column of light.
Whatever agency had held the Vandercook building aloft had now released its uncanny grip on the building, and thousands of tons of brick and mortar, of stone and steel, were plunging down in a mass from five thousand feet above the Hudson. The same force had also released the ill-fated men and women who had been carried aloft with the building.
Then, free of New York's skyline, the flying building was gone with a rush. A thousand feet above New York's tallest building, the Vandercook changed direction and moved directly into the west. The conference watched it go.... "Commissioner," Jeter yelled at the police chief of Manhattan, "get word out at once for all lights to be put out in the city! Hurry! Radio would be fastest."
"How do you explain the Vandercook incident? The bridge thing? The rise and fall of the other skyscrapers?" "Some substance or ray capable of being controlled and directed. It creates a field, of any size desired, in which gravitation is well, shall we say erased? Then any solid which is thus made weightless could be lifted by the two good hands of a strong man, or even of a weak one.
It came down from the dark skies from a vast distance, widening to encompass the top of the Vandercook building. The Vandercook building might almost have been a mouse caught in the talons of some unbelievable night-hawk.
The conference above the Hadley building fancied they could feel the outward rush of air displaced by the falling monster and drew back in fear from the edge of the roof. The Vandercook struck the surface of the Hudson and an uprush of geysering water for a few seconds blotted the great building from view. Then all Manhattan seemed to shudder.
There would be no end to the loss of life until some measure of sanity had been argued into crazed humanity. All the time he kept wondering. What was doing all this awful business? He surmised that some anti-gravitational agency was responsible for the levitation of the Vandercook building, but what sort of intelligence was directing it? Was the intelligence human? Bestial? Maniacal?
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