“What?” I asked.
“I am getting that same stuff again,” he said. “I can hear voices, very faintly, but, unmistakably, human voices. They, are speaking a language unknown to man. It is maddening.”
“Mars, perhaps,” I suggested, “or Venus.”
He knitted his brows and then suddenly smiled one of his quick smiles. “Or Pellucidar.”
I shrugged.
“Do you know, Admiral,” he said (he calls me Admiral because of a yachting cap I wear at the beach), “that when I was a kid I used to believe every word of those crazy stories of yours about Mars and Pellucidar. The inner world at the earth’s core was as real to me as the High Sierras, the San Joaquin Valley, or the Golden Gate, and I felt that I knew the twin cities of Helium better than I did Los Angeles.
“I saw nothing improbable at all in that trip of David Innes and old man Perry through the earth’s crust to Pellucidar. Yes, sir, that was all gospel to me when I was a kid.”
“And now you are twenty-three and know that it can’t be true,” I said, with a smile.
“You are trying to tell me it is true, are you?” he demanded, laughing.
“I never have told any one that it is true,” I replied; “I let people think what they think, but I reserve the right to do likewise.”