At noon a black void of emptiness surrounded us. It was the longest, the most gigantic we had encountered, an hour of it.
Then again a point showed. It spread to the sides of us. But it was different. I could not say how. It was vague, gray. It streamed past, very distant on both sides and beneath us. At one moment I fancied it appeared as a distant, gigantic enveloping curtain, gray and vague. But then I thought it was a film of tiny globules, solid, entities, unradiant.
I called Dr. Weatherby. But before he arrived, the grayness had all slipped behind us. He saw it as a gray, formless blob. It congealed to a point. And then it vanished.
“That was an atom, Leonard,” he said. His voice had an excitement in it. “That was our first sight of anything of the new realm large enough to have an identity. Substance, Leonard! The substance of which our universe, our earth, is so infinitesimal a part. Everything we see now will be identical with it. The atoms! We are emerging!”
They aroused me from sleep some hours later, calling me excitedly. I found them all in the instrument room crowded around Dolores who was sitting on the couch, her hands pressed against her forehead. Jim cried; “She’s getting thought-waves, Len! Some one is communicating with her!”
Dr. Weatherby was murmuring, “What is it, Dolores? Do you get it clearer now?”
“Yes. Someone is thinking: We can see you! We see you coming!”
“Yes, Dolores. What else?”
“That’s all. We’re watching! We see you coming!”