Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/23
I have discussed the theoretical and scientific features of the whole thing with Sydney, over a dinner for two that lasted until the dawn.
The air which bore them up the moon crater and far into outer space solidified around them, liquefying and freeaing with terrific rapidity in the absolute cold into which they entered. The bodies of all four were frozen, of course, and preserved alive in the frozen condition in the same manner in which, experimentally, dogs have been frozen and later thawed and revived in the laboratory. The gin bottle was frozen into the large berg containing Sydney and Valerie Dorn, because its small volume offered so little surface to the up-rushing air that it moved upward slowly, and was overtaken by the bodies of the man and woman who shortly afterward hurled themselves, clasped in each other's embrace, into the uprushing air-geyser.
The friendship between the four who were rescued in the South Pacific is of a nature which might in itself testify to shared experiences of unparalleled beauty and terror, horror and virtory over almost certain destruction. Valerie Dorn and Michael Sydney repeatedly expressed their delight that Gibbs and his wife had followed them, during the voyage back to Seattle on the Northbound.
It is hard not to digress into the personal and human side of a story, an experience, so breath-taking. But to return again to the scientific features, or theories, of Sydney's manuscript and account—
The encasing shroud of frozen air was large enough to protect the bodies of the four men and women in a state of suspended animation, through the encounter with the Earth's atmosphere and the plunge deep into the waters of the ocean, through which the "bergs" rose again upward to float on the surface of the water until the advent of the Northbound.
In space-travel fiction, anything plunging with meteor-speed into the earth's atmosphere flames and burns to an ash, unless it be a space-ship of resistant metal; we have here, however, the unprecedented hard coldness of space-frozen air. We have likewise, in defense of Sydney's explanation of events otherwise utterly inexplicable, the oft-reiterated accounts in the late Charles Fort's writings of "apports from the sky"—small animals, often of the lower orders such as periwinkles, snakes and toads—each being encased in a sheath of ice. Here, then, is a definite check of a highly evidential nature. But it is, I predict, one which will not interest scientists.
The hollow moon! The ancient, brittle satellite, drying and cracking, leaving great internal fissures and then a hollow centet into which gravity draws down as by a great sucking process the atmosphere which encircled it as it first was torn from Earth. What could be more reasonable? In its very reasonableness I find another check. But I offer no opinion. The Investigator publishes authenticated accounts of unusual happenings, and quotes the reasonable explanations offered in their substantiation. Beyond that, it does not go.
Before this issue of The Investigator goes to press, the newspapers will have announced the marriage of Michael Sydney and Valerie Dorn.
Open Letter to Readers of "The Investigator"
To you, the readers, I have been permitted by my friend Mr. Graham, editor of The Investigator, to write these few words directly:
The Investigator is the journal of the open-minded, and Mr. Graham's editorial comments are fair in the extreme. However, I feel that the facts in the above truthfully recorded document demand something more.
These few words are in the nature of an