“Then that thing we can see—”
“Is a city, or its equivalent. You’ve seen its size, so you can judge for yourself the civilization that must have built it. All the world we know—our oceans and continents and mountains—is nothing more than a film of mist surrounding something beyond our comprehension.”
Neither of us said anything for a while. I remember feeling a foolish surprise at being one of the first men in the world to learn the appalling truth; for somehow I never doubted that it was the truth. And I wondered how the rest of humanity would react when the revelation came.
Presently I broke into the silence. “If you’re right,” I said, “why have they—whatever they are—never made contact with us?”
The Professor looked at me rather pityingly. “We think we’re good engineers,” he said, “but how could we reach them? Besides, I’m not at all sure that there haven’t been contacts. Think of all the underground creatures and the mythology—trolls and kobolds and the rest. No, it’s quite impossible—I take it back. Still, the idea is rather suggestive.”
All the while the pattern on the screen had never changed: the dim network still glowed there, challenging our sanity. I tried to imagine streets and buildings and the creatures going among them, creatures who could make their way through the incandescent rock as a fish swims through water. It was fantastic… and then I remembered the incredibly narrow range of temperatures and pressures under which the human race exists. We, not they, were the freaks, for almost all the matter in the universe is at temperatures of thousands or even millions of degrees.
“Well,” I said lamely, “what do we do now?”
The Professor leaned forward eagerly. “First we must learn a great deal more, and we must keep this an absolute secret until we are sure of the facts. Can you imagine the panic there would be if this information leaked out? Of course, the truth’s inevitable sooner or later; but we may be able to break it slowly.
“You’ll realize that the geological surveying side of my work is now utterly unimportant. The first thing we have to do is to build a chain of stations to find the extent of the structure. I visualize them at ten-mile intervals towards the north, but I’d like to build the first one somewhere in South London to see how extensive the thing is. The whole job will have to be kept as secret as the building of the first radar chain in the late thirties.
“At the same time, I’m going to push up my transmitter power again. I hope to be able to beam the output much more narrowly, and so greatly increase the energy concentration. But this will involve all sorts of mechanical difficulties, and I’ll need more assistance.”