Line to other worlds was operating again, chiefly so that reconstruction could begin on other planets as well, they also having suffered severely from the sun’s near-extinction.
When the news of the strange craft reached the Amazon, she sat studying its details outlined in the report, oblivious for the moment of the helpers on either side of her.
There was Chris Wilson, Chief Executive of the Dodd Space Line—a fleshy, pink-faced man verging on late middle age. Next to him, musing over a new social outline for the youth of the world, was his daughter Ethel, close on thirty, black-haired, blue-eyed, intensely vital and alert. Farther along the conference table sat Beatrice Wilson, mellow and middle-aged, Ethel’s mother; and opposite her were Commander and Ruth Kerrigan, formerly Dodd, the owners of the space line.
The Amazon handed the report to Wilson without comment. The passing years, so marked now in the elderly members present, did not exist for her, She still looked about twenty-five, graceful as a tigress, amber-skinned, her beautiful face unmarred by a single line. The scarlet in which she was dressed emphasized the flowing gold of her shoulder-length hair and the deep purple of her eyes. Even had her attractiveness been that of beauty alone, it would have been fascinating—but this was her least vital gift. Her power lay in her superhuman strength and uncanny scientific knowledge, both gifts wished on her by the skill of a long dead surgeon during her infancy. Chris Wilson, handing the report to his neighbour, said: “We’ve nothing like that in the spaceways.”
“No, we haven’t.” The Amazon sat musing, her gaze fixed absently through the vast window onto the girders and skeletal buildings of reviving London. “And we also know that the colonists on the Moon and Mars have not. Mercury is dead, Venus is completely uninhabitable. So this craft is either from some unknown spot in the void and contains explorers—or, more likely, it has come from Jupiter.”
Ethel Wilson gave a start. “Aunt Vi, you mean it might be Abna, that god-like man who helped you rekindle the Sun? The one who once saved me from death?”
“Yes, it might be Abna,” the Amazon agreed, and smiled a trifle cynically to herself. “It wouldn’t be a great surprise, either. He never did strike me as being the kind of man to take a beating lying down.”
“I think you did wrongly toward Abna, Vi,” Chris Wilson said. “After all, he had much to give—vast science derived from Atlantis—and all he wanted in return was for you to marry him. Instead of that, you palmed a synthetic image of yourself onto him and let him go back home!”
“He deceived me, so I deceived him.” The Amazon raised and lowered her graceful shoulders. “He only wanted marriage with me for one purpose—because not a single woman exists in his race, inhabiting the domed city under the Red Spot of Jupiter. His idea was to marry me, our offspring to form the basis of a new race. Coldly scientific and biological. It had nothing to do with his professed love for me.”
“I can’t quite believe that, Vi,” Commander Kerrigan said, smiling in his wealth of grey beard. “I could not imagine a better matched pair than you and Abna. He’s every bit as scientific as you are and, surprisingly enough, every bit as strong. You are sure it isn’t jealousy of his power and intelligence that makes you pretend to hate him?”
“I don’t hate him, and I never said I did. He deserved teaching a lesson for hoodwinking me. If it should be he who has returned, I’m afraid he’ll have to learn yet another lesson. As I told him in my concluding words, it will have to be his science against mine.”
She glanced about her at a gradually deepening vibration. The sensation increased until the room, for a moment, seemed to sway and then became steady again.
“That,” Chris said, “was a mighty big earth shock somewhere!”
The Amazon nodded, undisturbed. “Not that it’s anything unusual these days. Earthquakes following the collapse of the great glacier are inevitable.”
* * * *
At that moment, two transatlantic pilots were viewing the cause of the earthquake from a height of 10,000 feet. Their job was flying the four-a-day rocket plane freight flights across the Atlantic from London to New York. This was the third trip of the day. One moment they were streaking through the pale blue spring sky with nothing disturbing the peace of the rolling Atlantic far beneath; the next they beheld the most incredible thing they had never known.
The grey rollers of the ocean parted mysteriously ahead of them, and Pilot Carson suddenly cut down speed as he saw the phenomenon commencing. “Balls of fire!” he breathed, stunned. “Just take a look at that, Jeff!”
Jeff Baxley, his navigator, did not need to be told. Pop-eyed, he was gazing at the waters, agitated by some invisible and inconceivably powerful force, as they rolled upward and outward before the arrival of something from the ocean’s depths. At the same moment, violent air disturbances and a sense of tremendous magnetic strain hit the flier.
It swayed and reeled out of control, spun about in a vast electrical vortex.
Dazed, but still unhurt, unable to control the craft, the two men watched land, buried for centuries under the ocean, start rising from the water, thrusting algae-covered pinnacles into the sunlight, water pouring from every cranny as though from the conning tower of a surfacing submarine.
The pinnacles became large, pointed rocks—then rose higher and became hills. Higher still until they were revealed as actual mountains. Land at their bases came next, thrust out of the ocean’s depths and stretching in a colossal plateau as far as the pilots could see in either direction.
Then the electrical vortex was gone and they gazed at mighty tidal waves receding from them, one in each direction, which must finally crash on the shores of Britain, Federated Europe, the United States, and perhaps eastern South America.
With difficulty Pilot Carson got the flier under control again. “Dry land!” he cried. “Just look at it, Jeff! Dry land where there was ocean—a huge plateau of it! I’ll bet it goes all the way from Britain to America across the Atlantic.”
Jeff switched on recording cameras, and changing direction, Carson set the machine flying over the dripping rock landscape where formerly the Atlantic had rolled in majesty. Everywhere the two men looked there were lakes, still draining off into the depths of the plateau. Where the water had already vanished there were endless acres of green algae and sea fungi. The most incredible things of all were the mountains towering into the sky.
Carson said, “The tops of those mountains were originally the islands of the Azores. Now they’re sticking nearly 3,000 feet into the air.”
The navigator said, staring ahead intently, “Looks to me like a city or something, under a glass cover.”
As the flier swept onward there loomed up a mighty gleaming hemisphere, entirely devoid of algae and catching the light of the sun in a myriad reflections. It rose perhaps 300 feet at the highest point—a perfect dome.
Carson swung the flier so that they swept over it in a circle, the cameras recording steadily. There certainly was some kind of city inside the dome, but of people or life of any kind there was no trace. In fact, there was more than a city under the dome. There seemed to be quite a lot of forest as well.
“That’s the biggest saucepan lid I ever saw,” Carson said. “Must be all of thirty miles across at its base. We’ll finish our hop and then tip them off with the information in London. Good job we have a camera record, otherwise they’d think us crazy.” The machine darted westward to continue its course toward the United States.
