Chapter 2: The Ghostly Columns

Franz Kress had been gone a week, when all the world knew that he couldn’t possibly have stayed aloft that length of time. Yet no word was received from him, no report received from any part of the world that he had returned. Various islands which he might have reached were scoured for traces of him. The lighter vessels of most of the navies of the world joined in the search to no avail. Kress had merely mounted into the sky and vanished.

The world’s last word from him had been a few words on the radio-telephone:

“Have reached sixty thousand feet and--”

There the message had ended, as though the speaker, eleven miles above the earth, had been strangled. Yet he didn’t drop, as far as anybody in the world knew.

Lucian Jeter and Tema Eyer worked harder than ever, remembering the promise they had made Kress at his take-off. Whatever had happened to him, he seemingly in part had anticipated. And now the partners would go up, too, seeking information--perhaps to vanish as Kress had vanished. They were not afraid. They shared the world’s feeling of dread, but they were not afraid. Of course death would end their labors, but there were many scientists in the world to take up where they might leave off.

There were, for example, Sitsumi of Japan, rumored discoverer of a substance capable of bending light rays about itself to render itself invisible; Wang Li, Liao Wu, Yung Chan, of China--three who had degrees from the world’s greatest universities and had added miraculously to the store of knowledge by their own inspired research. These three were patriotically eager to bring China back to her rightful place as the leader in scientific research--a place she had not held for a thousand years. It was generally agreed among scientists that the three would shortly outstrip all their contemporaries.

As Jeter thought of these four men, Orientals all, it suddenly occurred to him to communicate with them. He talked it over with Eyer and decided to send carefully worded cables to all four.

In a few hours he received answers to them:

From Japan: “Sitsumi does not care to communicate.” There was a world of cold hostility in the words, Jeter thought, and Eyer agreed with him.

From China came the strangest message of all:

“Wang, Liao and Yung have been cut off from world for past four months, conducting confidential research in Gobi laboratories. Impossible to communicate because area in which laboratories situated in Japanese hands and surrounded by cordon of guards.”

Jeter and Eyer stared at each other when the cable had been read and digested.

“Queer, isn’t it?” said Eyer.

Jeter didn’t answer. That preoccupied expression was on his face, that distant look which no man could erase from his face by any interruption until Jeter had finished his train of thought.

“Queer,” thought Jeter, “that Sitsumi should be so snooty and the three Chinese totally unavailable.”

There were many strange things happening lately, too, and the queer things kept on happening, and in ever-increasing numbers, during the second week of Kress’ impossible absence in the stratosphere. Or was he there? Had he ever reached it? Had he--Jeter and Eyer had noticed his utter gloom at the take-off--merely, climbed out of sight of the Earth and then slanted down to a dive into the ocean? Maybe he was a suicide. But some bits of wreckage of his plane had many unsinkable parts about it--the parachute ball for instance.

No, the solemn fact remained that Kress had simply flown up and hadn’t come down again. It would have sounded silly and absurd if it hadn’t been so serious.

And strange stories were seeping into the press of the world.

Out in Wyoming a cattleman had driven a herd of prime steers into the round-up corral at night. Next morning not one of the steers could be found. No tracks led away from the corral. The gates were closed, exactly as they had been left the night before. There had been no cowboys watching the steers, for the corral had always been strong enough to hold the most rambunctious.

The tale of the missing steers hit the headlines, but so far nobody had thought of this disappearance in connection with Kress’. How could any one? Steers and scientists didn’t go together. But it still was strange.

At least so Jeter thought. His mind worked with this and other strange happenings even as he and Eyer worked at top speed.

A young fellow in Arizona told a yarn of wandering about the crater of a meteor which had fallen on the desert thousands of years before. The place wasn’t important nor did it seem to have anything to do with the crater or meteors--but the young fellow reported that he had seen a faded white column of light, like the beam of a great searchlight, reaching up into the sky from somewhere on the desert.

When people became amazed at his story he added to it. There had been five columns of light instead of one. The one he had first mentioned had touched the Earth, or had shot up from the Earth, within several miles of his point of vantage. A second glowed off to the northwest, a third to the southwest, a fourth to the southeast, the fifth to the northeast. The first one seemed to “center” the other four--they might have been the five legs of a table, according to their arrangement...