followed twenty closely-written pages of technical description. Tim folded the manuscript and looked around at the astonished faces. Stamford was the first to break the silence.
“Preposterous!” he spluttered. “Impossible! Absurd!…It’s a nightmare! Another world — good God!”
“I believe every word of it.” It was Sir Charles’s quiet voice that stilled the agitated lawyer. “Of course, that is the speck by the side of the corona! Not the world which poor Colson found, but the moon of that world.”
“But couldn’t it be visible at some time?”
Sir Charles shook his head. “Not if it followed the exact orbit of the earth and was placed directly opposite — that is to say, immediately on the other side of the sun. It might overlap at periods, but in the glare of the sun it would be impossible to see so tiny an object. No, there is every possibility that Colson’s story is stark truth.”
He took the manuscript from Tim’s hand and read rapidly through the technical description.
“With this,” he said, touching the paper, “we shall be able to get into communication with these people. If we only had the vocabulary!” he groaned.
“I am afraid you will never hear from Neo again, sir,” said Tim quietly, and told of that brief but poignant minute of conversation he had had before the cry of the dying servant, and the crash of broken instruments, had brought the voice to an abrupt end.
After the lawyer and the scientist had departed, he went with Elsie into the instrument room, and they gazed in silence upon the motionless apparatus.
“The link is broken,” he said at last; “it can never be forged again, unless a new Colson arrives on both earths.”
She slipped her arm in his.
“Aren’t you glad?” she asked softly. “Do you want to know what will happen tomorrow or the next day?”
He shivered. “No. I don’t think so. But I should like to know what will happen in a few years’ time, when I’m a little older and you’re a little older.”
“Perhaps we’ll find a new world of our own,” said Elsie.
The End
The Green Rust
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