The Life-Masters

The first intimation the world received of the life-masters and of the doom that they were to loose upon it was contained in a news dispatch sent out by the great press syndicates from New York in the last week of May. That first article, a brief one, stated only that during the last day or so the beaches about the metropolis had been closed to bathers by reason of a thick scum of clear gray, jelly-like substance that had been left upon them by the retreating tides. This clear slime, which exhibited a few signs of rudimentary life and movement, had been deposited also by the tides upon the sea-walls and dock-piles about the city, and had been reported too from a score or more of places along the New Jersey and New England seaboard. These glistening deposits, the dispatch added, were considered to be in all probability the result of some sea-migration of a great mass of minute, jelly-like organisms.

That first dispatch, the true sinister importance of which we can well understand now, was treated at the time as merely one of scores of other reports of mildly interesting incidents. The phenomenon was unusual, certainly, but hardly enough so to merit any special attention. This was evidenced by the small space given the matter by the New York newspapers on that same evening, most of them according it but a few inconspicuous lines; though one went so far as to publish a photograph of the curious onlookers who had gathered to watch the glistening scum of the stuff, slowly moving and flexing a little now and then, that had been deposited on the Battery sea-wall. Save for these casually curious ones, though, and the disgusted bathers who found themselves barred by it from their favorite beaches, it can not be said that any portion of the public, even in such seaside cities as New York, gave the advent of the glistening gray stuff any consideration on that afternoon and evening. It was not until the newspapers of the following morning, the 26th, published their later dispatches on the phenomenon that the world, or the scientific world at least, began to awake to its extraordinary nature.

Those dispatches converted the matter from a mere unusual incident into something like a minor sensation. For, according to them, the deposits of glistening gray slime had been left by the tides not only along the Atlantic coast but along the Pacific also, and not only along American shores but upon those of Europe and Asia and Africa, upon all the shores of all earth's seas, in fact. Upon the jungle-bordered beaches of the Philippines, and the cold gray Norwegian shores, and the shelving sands of the Chilean coast, and the rocky cliffs of England, the retreating tides had left the same thick coatings of jelly-like, living slime. The phenomenon, whatever its cause, was world-wide, as those morning dispatches showed, and because of that world-wide scope was accorded a greatly increased space by the majority of that morning's newspapers, seeming extraordinary enough to call for greater attention. And even more extraordinary was it made, later in that day, by the Barr-McMasters controversy concerning it, that acrid dispute of scientists about the phenomenon's causes that stirred even the public into a somewhat greater interest in it.