Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/14

14 the voice again, to pick up any sound from the ether, but his efforts were worse than useless. His mind was too stunned to function logically.

"God!" he muttered aloud. "What does all this mean?"

After another futile attempt to contact New York, he sprang to his feet and banged out of the control cabin. On the deck he found Larry, and several of the ship's crew staring anxiously at the western horizon.

The green fog was, if anything, denser and more impenetrable than it had been fifteen minutes earlier. But to the west, toward the direction in which New York lay, there was a vast white light spreading for miles in all directions. It was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of Larry and the crew.

It was similar to the Northern Lights, except that it was constant and unvaryingly bright.

"For the Lord's sake," Larry exclaimed, as Dirk came alongside him. "What's going on?"

Dirk started to tell him of the voice he had picked up from the ether, but Larry grabbed his arm excitedly.

"Look!" he cried, pointing toward the vast expanse of bright light which lay over the western horizon like a great pall.

Dirk's eyes followed Larry's pointing finger. Through the wide area of brilliant light he could make out four great shapes moving with incredible speed. They were ships, airships, of some sort. Torpedo-like in shape, more than a hundred feet in length, they flashed through the chalk-white expanses of blinding light like mighty, fantastic sharks.

WO of the great ships were blue the other two, red. That was all he had time to make out for, in the next instant, the four huge shapes had flashed over their heads, to disappear with a rush of air into the enveloping green fog.

"Did you see that?" Larry asked shakenly.

Dirk nodded.

His attention was again attracted to the great white light that covered half the sky now, blotting out the faint rays of the cloud-hidden sun. More gigantic ships were coming into sight, flashing into the range of his vision for a brief instant and then disappearing like roaring phantoms into the green fog.

This time he was able to notice that from the rear of the cigar-shaped ships a shower of fiery sparks trailed, mingling for an instant with the green phosphorescence of the fog before vanishing.

A terrible, frightening premonition was growing in Dirk's mind. A horrible certainty was growing in him, born of what he had seen and heard in the last mad hour.

These strange terrifying ships that flashed over their heads were not from any part of the earth. They had come