I NEED NOT SPECIFY all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But with him, a man of cold logic and careful science—well, it must have been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?
You couldn’t make such speculations public. People would laugh. But some wouldn’t. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And Dr. Johns had sent for me—a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales.
“You two, say nothing of this,” he warn
