The Shadow People. John Russell Fearn
form of purple energy that had blown Viona—daughter of the Amazon and Abna—into an entirely different space. Now the Amazon and Abna had repeated the condition and they, too, were absorbed into this unexplained region. The only concrete thing they could hang on to was the fact that Viona’s machine was not far away, moving against the pinpoints of the stars. Within the machine the girl herself was presumably alive, and Mexone, her husband, also.
“Try radio,” Abna decided at length, and crossed to the instrument board. He spent a moment or two adjusting the controls and listening to the queer whistling note from the speaker.
“Abna calling Viona,” he intoned into the microphone. “Can you hear me?”
There was a crackling of static, a wailing note, and then a reedy voice answered. It was unmistakably the voice of Viona.
“Dad! It’s you? Where are you?”
“Approximately 2,000 miles away,” Abna responded, looking at the instruments. “We can see you clearly as a moving speck despite the distance. I’ll flash a signal light and maybe you’ll be able to spot it.”
He gave a nod to the Amazon, and she promptly pressed the switch of the single searchlight with which the machine was equipped. A brilliant light flashed on and off into the void, and immediately Viona’s voice chattered again in the loudspeaker.
“Yes, I see it! Keep on flashing so I shan’t lose you. What do I do now? Fly toward you?”
“Yes, you’d better do that. All four of us had better get together again. We’re not going to achieve anything separately.”
With that Abna switched off and crossed to the window to watch developments. The Amazon beside him, they stood surveying the lilac haze—the shadows of people crossing it occasionally—and in particular their attention concentrated on that tiny glittering speck which was Viona’s space machine. Why it glittered when there was no visible sun was only one of the mysteries in this region. Light seemed to be transmitted brilliantly, but indirectly.
“There was something in that bomb which caused all this to happen,” the Amazon remarked, as she watched the distant space machine slowly turn and head in their direction. “I’m just trying to think what it could have been. And it repeated twice, don’t forget—once for Viona and Mexone, and again for us.… We’ve got to find out what happened.”
“True enough, but it can wait until later. I want to find out something about this space to begin with.”
The Amazon nodded, taking her eyes for a moment from the advancing space machine to the mysteries of infinity around her. She frowned as a titanic pair of legs came and went—shadows again, like the elongated shadows cast by a setting sun. They seemed to extend for infinite miles. For a moment she thought she had the solution, then it evaded her again.
The distant space machine grew. Abna waited until it was near enough to see the outlines clearly, then he crossed again to the radio and switched it on.
“Draw alongside,” he instructed. “We’ll put airlock to airlock and you can jump through. Okay?”
“Yes—okay,” came Viona’s young, eager voice. “Shan’t be long now.”
In that she was correct. When at last a dull thud and a slight quiver of the spaceship announced that contact was complete, Abna unfastened the somewhat old-fashioned airlock. Presently the airlock of Viona’s machine was drawn into airtight contact by suction, and in a moment she and Mexone had made the easy leap from one machine to the other.
“Thank goodness for that!” Viona exclaimed, and threw herself into the Amazon’s arms.
For a moment there was a tangle of golden and copper hair as mother and daughter embraced. Abna grinned, shook the big hand of Mexone, and then closed the airlock. In a few moments he was driving the machine away from the abandoned vessel, cruising to nowhere in particular.
“Well, what sort of a place are we in?” Viona questioned, turning at last and swinging to Abna’s embrace. “Any ideas, dad?”
“I’ve had little time to formulate any. One thing I do know: this is a space we’re not familiar with. Even the stars and constellations are cockeyed, aren’t they, Vi?”
But the Amazon did not reply. She was again at the window, her unfathomable violet eyes contemplating space. She did not even seem to be aware there were others in the control room. Her extraordinary mind was given over entirely to the mystery of the surroundings.
“We’ve tried to figure it out, but we just get nowhere,” Mexone said, as Abna glanced at him. “It was something to do with that exploding bomb we dropped—and that seems to be the limit of what we can discover.”
“You weren’t hurt at all when you were blown in this space?” Abna asked.
“Not at all,” Viona responded. “Plenty of bruises, but we don’t bruise easy. We were worried because we didn’t know how to begin finding the way back. Now, of course, everything will be all right.”
Abna smiled slightly. The superb trust the younger ones had in himself and the Amazon was something he did not accept lightly. He knew the responsibility, and was proud to wrestle with it.
“I may be wrong,” said the Amazon at last, her voice slow and thoughtful, “but I don’t think those stars are stars at all!”
“Then what—are they?” Viona asked hesitantly, her sapphire blue eyes full of wonder.
The reply was unexpected, yet to the point. “I think they’re lighted windows!”
“Windows?” Abna repeated. “How do you make that out?”
“Imagine yourself as a worm,” the Amazon mused.
“Sometimes I am, in your estimation.”
The violet eyes flashed reproof. “Don’t go off into one of your ‘little boy’ moods, Abna. This is serious! I repeat, imagine yourself a worm, at night, looking up at the tallest building in London. You’d see lighted windows, spread out against the dark.”
Abna looked long and earnestly, then he gave a low whistle.
“I believe you’re right,” he said slowly.
“There’s another thing,” the Amazon went on, “and that’s the size of these shadow people. By comparison they would just be about normal if the stars we see are windows—normal, that is, for entry into one of the buildings.”
“Could be,” Viona murmured, also looking. “Have you got a theory about all this, mother?”
“Certainly I have. We all know that matter, when reduced to the last analysis, is basically a series of electrical charges with atomic spaces between. It is then visible only as a misty outline. To use an analogy— Look at a newspaper photograph from a distance, and it is perfectly normal. Look at it near-to and one sees an interspacing and the texture of the paper, with the picture only as a vague outline. So it is here.…” The Amazon paused for a moment, thinking. Then: “Long ago, in one of our experiences, we were plunged into the infinitely small, the region of atomic space. From that adventure we learned a good deal about relativity. That was an instance of being in the microcosm. I am wondering if perhaps there isn’t a similar case here, only instead of being the microcosm, it’s the macrocosm, the infinitely large.”
“Meaning,” Abna said at length, “that in our leap from normal space we extended infinitely and burst through the molecule which is our universe into an immensely greater one beyond? That being so, we are reduced to midget—indeed microscopic—size by comparison with our surroundings?”
“That is what I think has happened,” the Amazon agreed. “And we can never hope to understand these shadow people, or gain the least conception of the space we’re in, unless we, too, are of the same size.”
“Which looks like being pretty well impossible,” Viona said ruefully.
“There’s