The gray area was shrinking to a blob, a blob of gray shining in a brilliant light. Directly beneath us, stretching to the horizon on both sides, lay an undulating white level surface. The single blob of gray was down there on it. And off in the distance, where the surface seemed abruptly to end, gigantic blurs loomed into the blue sky.
Dr. Weatherby was calling me to the tower. I found him trembling with eagerness. “Leonard, I have the electro-telescope working. Look through it.”
I gazed first through the front and overhead tower windows. The white disk filled a perceptible area of the sky. But it was not like a sun; it seemed rather a smooth, flat disk with light behind it, a white disk with a dark narrow rim. Clear, cloudless sky was everywhere else. And very far away, behind and above the white disk, I saw a gigantic, formless, colorless shape towering into the blue of distance.
“Look through the telescope, Leonard.”
I gazed upward through the electro-telescope. Its condensing lens narrowed the whole gigantic scene into a small circular field of vision. I gasped. Wonderment, awe swept over me. The blue sky was the open space of a tremendously large room: I saw plainly its ceiling, floor and distant walls.
The giant shape was a man. He was bending forward over a table—the table was under me. The man’s hunched shoulders and peering face were above me.
For an instant my mind failed to grasp it all. I swung the telescope field downward, sidewise, and up again. And then at last I understood. This was a room, with men grouped at this nearer end of it around the table—men of human form, intent faces framed with long, white hair.
The undulating surface over which our vehicle was floating, was a slide of what seemed glass, a clear glass slide with a speck of gray rock lying in its center. And the white disk over us in the sky was the lower, small lens of the microscope through which these men were examining us!
VI
THE NEW REALM
Twenty days! So full of strange impressions I scarcely know how to recount them. Yet, after such a trip, they were days of almost normality.