efore the paper was printed.
. . . But that is by the way. As I sit and muse over this partly
carbonized sheet, that same curious remote vision comes again to me
that quickened in my mind that morning, a vision of those newspaper
offices I have already described to you going through the crisis.

The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in
its nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of
fever, what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with
the war. Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly,
amidst the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that
made the night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes
may have passed unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails
of green vapor seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps
of London fog. (In those days London even in summer was not safe
against dark fogs.) And then at the last the Change poured in and
overtook them.

If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden
universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal
quiet. They could have had no other intimation.

There was no time to stop the presses before the main development
of green vapor had overwhelmed every one. It must have folded
about them, tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them.
My imagination is always curiously stirred by the thought of that,
because I suppose it is the first picture I succeeded in making for
myself of what had happened in the towns. It has never quite lost
its strangeness for me that when the Change came, machinery went
on working. I don't precisely know why that should have seemed so
strange to me, but it did, and still to a certain extent does. One
is so accustomed, I suppose, to regard machinery as an extension
of human personality that the extent of its autonomy the Change
displayed came as a shock to me. The electric lights, for example,
hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone on burning at least
for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge presses must
have roared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy after copy
of that fabricated battle report with its quarter column of scare
headlines, and all the place must have still quivered and throbbed
with the familiar roar of the engines. And this though no men ruled
there at all any more! Here and there beneath that thickening fog
the crumpled or outstretched forms of men lay still.

A