hey were in
the minority. Most of humanity felt that it would rather be protected
against the denizens of space than to have a road open for them to
travel to the moon if they felt inclined.

[Sidenote: From a far world came monstrous invaders who were all the
more terrifying because invisible.]

To be sure, during the five years that the hole had been open, nothing
more dangerous to the peace and well-being of the world had appeared
from space than a few hundreds of the purple amoeba which we had found
so numerous on the outer side of the layer, when we had traveled in a
Hadley space ship up through the hole into the outer realms of space,
and one lone specimen of the green dragons which we had also
encountered. The amoeba had been readily destroyed by the disintegrating
rays of the guarding space-ships which were stationed inside the layer
at the edge of the hole and the lone dragon had fallen a ready victim to
the machine-gun bullets which had been poured into it. At first the
press had damned Jim Carpenter for opening the road for these horrors,
but once their harmlessness had been clearly established, the row had
died down and the appearance of an amoeba did not merit over a squib on
the inside pages of the daily papers.

* * * * *

While the hole in the heaviside layer was no longer news for the daily
press, a bitter controversy still waged in the scientific journals as to
the reason why no observer on earth, even when using the most powerful
telescopes, could see the amoeba before they entered the hole, and then
only when their telescopes were set up directly under the hole. When a
telescope of even small power was mounted in the grounds back of
Carpenter's laboratory, the amoeba could be detected as soon as they
entered the hole, or when they passed above it through space; but, aside
from that point of vantage, they were entirely invisible.

Carpenter's theory of the absorptive powers of the material of which the
heaviside layer was composed was laughed to scorn by most scientists,
who pointed out the fact that the sun, moon and stars could be readily
seen through it. Carpenter replied that the rays of colored or visible
light could only pass through the layer when superimposed upon a carrier
wave of ultra-violet or invisible light. He stated dogmatically that the
amoeba and the other denizens of space absorbed all the ultra-violet
light which fell on them and reflected only t