Just tales to send one shivering to bed. Just stories that should not be read at midnight. Stories that made one a little nervous when a tree squeaked in the wind outside the window or the rain walked along the shingles.
It had taken the wizardry of the Solar System's best band of scientists to open the door that led into the world beyond.
And yet people in unknown, savage ages had talked of things like these ... of goblin and incubus and imp. Perhaps men in Atlantis might have found the way, even as Nevin and Cartwright had found the way. In that long-gone day letting loose upon the world a flood of things that for ages after had lived in chimney-corner stories to chill one to the marrow.
And the pictures he had seen?
Ancestral memory, perhaps. Or a weird imaging that happened to be true. Or had the writers of those stories, the painters of those pictures....
West shuddered from the thought.
What was it Cartwright had said? The work is started on the other planets.
The work of passing along the knowledge, the principles, the psychology of the alien things of otherwhere. Education by remote control ... involuntary education. Stella, the telepathic Stella, singing back on Earth, darling of the airways. And she was an agent for these things ... she passed along the knowledge and a man would think it was his own.
That was it, of course, the thing that Nevin and Cartwright had planned. Remake the world, they'd said. Sitting out on Pluto and pulling strings that would remake the world.
Superstitions once. Hard facts now. Stories once to make the blood run cold. And now—