operation that made me a superwoman was not complete. It left me with emotions, and I cannot always rule them.”
A clerk came in with a message, and the Amazon rose.
“Anything needing my immediate attention?” she asked. “If nothing is required, I’ll retire to my Surrey home and lose myself in experiments. I had better get used to being alone again.”
“No, nothing,” Chris said. “The world is at peace and everybody seems more or less satisfied. Conditions are normal on Mars and the Moon and—” Chris stopped, looking at the message in his hand. “Take a look at this,” he said.
The Amazon took the note handed to her. It was on the Space Line communication form and read:
“Have space pilots check up on unexplained dark patch in remoter deeps of space. Not clearly visible from Earth and would bear investigation. Office of the Astronomers.”
The Amazon read the message and for a moment there was something of the old gleam of interest in her eyes, then it faded out.
“Probably a dark area like Cygnus,” she said, handing the message back. “They appear at times.… Well, since there is nothing more exciting than that I’ll be on my way.”
Half an hour later she was in her own home in Surrey—a home of scientific gadgets and robot servants, yet with a touch of femininity here and there. The Amazon had a meal, changed into laboratory coveralls, and then considered what to do next. At the back of her mind was the memory of the message Chris had received. She could not help her scientific interest even though she had brushed the matter aside at the time. In another hour it would be nightfall.…
“Better than nothing,” she muttered to herself and went into the laboratory-observatory annexed to the house. By the time she had adjusted the light-wave telescope to her satisfaction, an instrument infinitely more powerful than any other in the world since it drew light-waves unto itself in their original clarity from any given distance, the darkness was deepening and the night was clear.
CHAPTER TWO
SUPER-SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
A switch opened the roof and she settled in the scanning chair and peered through the eyepiece. An adjustment of the focussing screw brought the hosts of heaven leaping into relief, a picture such as she might have seen anywhere in space except that in this case the atmosphere prevented the pin-sharp brilliance existing in the void.
She searched far out to the remote spaces in the region of the North Star, searching out beyond Orion, the Coal-Sack, and the Black Hole of Cygnus.
Then she saw it—a roughly-formed circle of utter darkness in which not a single star or nebula gleamed. Beneath her fingers a switch clicked and the nearer-focus control came into operation. Immediately the stars on the edge of the darkness vanished. In all her experience she had never seen anything quite so black. There was not the faintest trace of radiating streaks, not even the ghost of nebulous dust. And the one thought hammering in her mind was that it had no conceivable right to be there.
Getting to her feet, she switched on the observatory lights, and going to the filing cabinet, she pressed a button. A series of slides, illuminated from the back, paraded before her vision—photographs of the cosmos, which she had made in her sell-imposed task of photographing the entire known Universe.
When she came to plate sixteen she removed it from its rack and studied it carefully. It showed exactly the same portion of heavens at which she had just been looking. It had been originally photographed a year ago and at that time the stars were numerous. Now there was only the Darkness, as yet only a smudge on the face of infinity, but one day—
She crossed to the radio-phone and switched it through to the observatory at Mount Wilson, California.
“Violet Ray Brant here,” she said as a voice responded. “What do you make of the queer dark patch in section eight of the Northern Hemisphere?”
“I’m glad you brought up the matter, Miss Brant,” the official in charge answered. “I was thinking of contacting you about it. All spaceport executives have been asked to have their pilots make a check on the phenomenon. Not that I expect much, since even if they travelled out as far as Pluto—which they don’t—it would not bring them measurably any nearer this queer smudge.”
“When did it commence to be seen?” the Amazon asked.
“About a week ago. It was only a speck at first, blotting out two stars. Since then it has grown considerably. When we take into account our distance from it, I am pretty well shocked when I think how big it must be. And since it is growing, it is obviously coming nearer.”
The Amazon said: “Thank you for your information. I’ll see what I can discover and let you know.”
She returned to the telescope and for a while she gazed through it. Then she went to a bank of instruments and switches on an apparatus that, as the thermopile can measure heat from the surface of the Moon, gave a reading of distant space. The apparatus incorporated special fourth-dimensional processes, so that the outflowing detector-wave from the instrument was able to hurdle the void at speeds many times in excess of the speed of light.
Now and again the needle jolted and registered maximum in heat as the nearer stars were reached—then it dropped again to the zero reading of space. Hours passed. The distance must be stupendous. Still the Amazon waited, but to her amazement it was five-and-a-half hours before she got the reaction she wanted. The readings were at zero in every direction. Heat, light, electromagnetic energy—none of these things registered.
Her readings complete, the Amazon made a note of each one and then went back into the house to study them. She settled down and worked through the night, hardly stirring until 7:30 the following morning. Then she picked up the visiphone. The face of Chris Wilson, speaking from his home, appeared in the scanning-plate.
“Oh, hello, Vi! I was just leaving for work—”
“Chris, I’ve made a most disturbing discovery,” the Amazon interrupted him. “You recall that message you showed me about a dark smudge in space?”
“Why, of course. But you said—”
“Since then I’ve looked into it, and my conclusion is that unless I can work out something in the meantime, the whole Universe is going to be blotted out!’”
“What!” Chris exclaimed. “Blotted out? How do you mean? Destroyed?”
“No. That would be merciful. Something much worse. Matter will remain, but light and heat and all forms of radiation will become things of the past.”
“I don’t understand, Vi.”
“Come to my place right away,” she said. “I want to show you what I’ve discovered.”
“I’ll come immediately.”
The Amazon summoned one of her telepathic-responsive robots. It laid a meal and tidied the room. By the time Chris had arrived, he found the Amazon had changed into a sweeping gown instead of her coveralls, looking what she was—a superbly beautiful woman.
“Sorry to drag you from your work,” she apologized, as they settled down and the robot attended to the refreshment, “but as the head of the Space Line, as far as Earth is concerned, you should know the facts. I am not going to broadcast them to the world as yet. Time enough to do that if my efforts to find a way round the difficulty should fail.”
“Fail?” Chris repeated, surprised. “I never knew you to admit such a possibility before. You, who created a sun when our own was destroyed; you who can destroy matter and build it up again—”
“Chris, no menace or difficulty I have fought before equals this one. There exists in the depths of space—inconceivably far away as yet—an ever-growing patch of non-space-time.”
“What is that?” Chris asked. “Space is space, isn’t it, no matter how you look at it?”
“Space