Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/110

buoyant, but this would in no way account for its superb powers of levitation in a like medium. Then under chemical analysis distinct traces of the gas hydrogen were found to be present. At once the secret was revealed. For this gas is the lightest of all the vapors and was used in all our great airships until helium, though heavier, was found to be safer, being non-inflammable. Undoubtedly this monster possesses the ability to separate the gas from the humid vapor always more or less present in our atmosphere. The process is probably of chemico-electric nature and instantaneous in action; which, though very astounding, is no more so than the extraction of oxygen from water with every inflating of the lungs of a fish.

Such an inflation of a tenuous elastic fabric would result in just such an instantaneous levitation as Messinger described; and when the hydrogen was expelled and the structure contracted, a falling stone would hardly drop quicker. The miracle lies really in the amazing control and nicety of manipulation of its medium of locomotion; but then all living creatures, save man, control their movements with a like perfection of accuracy.

By a little shrewd reasoning it has been deduced that its natural habitat is probably within the tropics where the humidity is greater than our latitudes; and for some unknown motive we have been visited by a lone strayer from its fellows: possibly the moment of the odd chance in a million that has peopled continents has dawned for their species.

It certainly is strange that all wild tribes dwelling near the equator are ridden by the fear of monstrous, shapeless, evil things that assail the night wanderer who at dawn is found lifeless and withered with the terror of that encounter. We have deemed these stories superstition; but the fear is a living force and must be based on something, to dominate millions as it does.

No explanation of the extraordinary mutilation of each of its victims has yet been advanced. All we can conceive is an organism endowed with a means of imbibing sustenance, much as a vastly magnified reproduction of the apparatus of the common mosquito—a lower surface with an infinite number of hairlike filaments, each the counterpart of that insect's proboscis and similarly provided with an irritant poison that draws the blood of a victim to the inserted borers.

But this is mere theory and may be right, or may be wrong, and well it will be for us if the truth is never known, and this the brute's last appearance; though several inexplicable disappearances have recently occurred among our flying men—craft and men have vanished from our world as though they had found another and been unable to return. And yet the daring adventurers fly still higher seeking the thing that dwells in the unknown beyond; and these missing craft may have encountered it.

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