To keep silent and conceal the truth was impossible. The Sunday newspapers were filled with alarming dispatches, articles and questions addressed to the scientific societies and individual specialists working in the fields of electro-chemistry and radioactivity.

Despite the fact that it was a holiday, a special meeting of all the professors of the Institute was called, and the most prominent representatives of scientific thought, that were in Berlin at that time, were also invited. Amongst them was Hinez — tired, emaciated and apparently grown older by many years. Deriugin, who had been working on some questions, on the solution of which now depended the fate of mankind, perhaps, was there also. The thought was wild and absurd; it sounded like a fairy-tale; yet, despite it, the chairman, opening the meeting, introduced that first. Never before had the walls of this meeting hall, within which a majestic spirit of sober discussions and cold understanding, always reigned, heard similar orations. The fantasy and the fairy-tale combined with reality; mathematic formulae and apocalyptic predictions were all blended into a strange chaos. But the most terrible thing of all was, that the meeting at once declared its complete incompetence for solving the problems they were confronted with. Man was impotent. The spirit he provoked turned against him and threatened complete annihilation. The meeting suddenly became pervaded with inexplicable alarm, and with a painful feeling of hopelessness; there seemed to be no way out of it.

Then Deriugin asked for the floor, and briefly summed up the situation on hand:

“The process is enlarging and growing. To wait till the obstinate work of the brain or a fortunate chance or accident will disclose to us a method or a means to stop it — is unthinkable. We must do now, at least, whatever is possible; we must check the further movements of the sphere — arrest it…”

The hall reverberated with exclamations of wonderment, almost indignation, on the part of the assembled scientists. Some delegates openly declared that they had not come there to listen to the hollow prattle of dilettanti.

Deriugin, having waited till the noise subsided, asked that he be heard carefully till the end. And concentrated attention, a few minutes later, was the answer to his speech.

His project had the following salient points: to adjust upon a huge caterpillar-tractor, moving at a speed of 40 kilometers an hour, a powerful dynamo, fed by electric motors of several thousand horsepower. Its current should pass through the armature of the electromagnet, thereby supplying the latter with colossal force. Four — five such colossal magnetos, in Deriugin’s opinion, would suffice to cause the sphere to move against a moderately blowing wind to reach the magnet poles.