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The world itself may have forgotten Coombes save for a few harsh memories of the man whose lack of vigilance had almost caused the destruction of the D-- Naval Base. A Court Martial. Dishonourable discharge. By the Empire hated and forgot. Yet I have never forgotten, for I alone came to know Coombes and the cause for his neglect. I alone can now tell the world that which he had suspected almost from the beginning but which he would never have revealed.

Calm had begun to settle over England when mad tales came pulsing out of the Duchy, tales of great cliffs silently disappearing into absolute nothingness! The Royal Academy scientists were gone without a word or trace and there were only incoherent mouthings of some ravenous mystery into whose maw their yacht had so completely vanished.

Horror struck us as we saw telecast shots of great cliffs soundlessly crumbling away into absolute nothingness, even less than dust! The import of it burned into our brains. Was England to perish in entirety, devoured by time's greedy abyss even as Atlantis west of Hercules, Lyonesse just adjacent to these very shores and other primal elder civilizations had been devoured by the sea and similar manifestations of nature's wrath?

We had to visit those cliffs. We had to view this nameless something ourselves. With official leave, we took my father's Mercedes-Benz and drove through Regent Street to bid adieux to Helen Chandler and Jane Harvey.

There were no adieux. They, fired with woman's eternal curiousity insisted that they go and share the common danger, We didn't argue; we even welcomed their company.

And so we motored out through Cornwall to Penzance and, eventually, Sennen Cove. extremely beautiful is quaint Sennen Cove, distinguished by its low-thatched cottages with gayly painted doors and windows, and close by the white- blazing expanse of beach.

Jane and Helen loved the place; they wanted to walk its streets and talk with its quaint people; but brooding over all was that intangible veil of fear -- a haunted, hunted look in the towns-folk's eyes, a reticence in their manner, a resignation to the workings of that which they could not understand and hence attributed to the Divine.

Inside the opened doorways one caught glimpses of trunks and valises and makeshift boxes packed and waiting, great vans and outmoded carts rolled eastward together, laden with the earthly possessions of these simple folk, surmounted by the folk themselves, fleeing inland from the dangerous sea.

The beauty of the town was dulled and blunted by the sight of those fugitives; we left it behind and took the cliff walk out into the uplands, ever mindful of the precautionary admonitions given us by the guards who, glimpsing our R.A.F. uniforms, passed us ....

You've never seen a finer couple than that. Never a harsh or an unkind word. Always complete understanding. You'd never believe that such a love could exist in the hum drum existance that is ours. But then neither Helen nor Dana was an ordinary person. They were interested in extra-sensory perception, telepathy -- all that the future might offer. They seemed to sense each other's wishes when together or apart. They had communicated over great distances via telepathy, firmly believing that if the heritage of tomorrow's children should be telepathy, it must find its birth and youth today. Tomorrow's children themselves; it seemed....

THERE WAS NOTHING menacing in the offing when we reached the forbidden brink of the sturdy cliffs and stood there with the tang of salt air in our nostrils, surveying a sea whose aquamarine depths seemed totally incapable of shielding some alien evil. Everything was so peaceful and quiet, disturbed only when a newsreel ship flew about overhead as if in attendance upon some strange advent.

Suddenly fear cut us to the quick. There was a shifting, shivering blur in the sky, a vague inchoate flame haze flickering with an ethereal opalescence. The sound as of surf beating faintly or a distant strand.

A crimson blurring, shifting aurora pulsed weirdly in the early dusk, a vast whorl out over the surging, heaving, angry sea. It expanded, struck the cliff's edge and the cliff was falling in nothingness. We ran frantically back before its ravenous advance but Helen stumbled and went down.

Arresting our headlong plunge, we turned back to aid her, crying out excitedly. A terrible curse rent Dana's lips; he poised there in indecision and wild fear. In the flicker of an eyelash that vagueness had engulfed Helen into its evanescent maw even as she struggled forward, white arms imploring, a despairing scream on her crimson lips.

Shadows melting into the dust. A void of nothingness hung between us and the sea. The mystic crimson whorl had drawn into itself and gone, leaving only space where Helen had stood.

Madness was in Dana's eyes; the terrible madness of losing all in life that matters. Incoherent words rose to his twisted lips; he flung himself insanely forward. Jane and I seized and brought him, struggling and screaming, back from that dizzy precipice beneath which the Atlantic hammered.

I can't describe the feelings that came over us then: the sickening sense of loss; the terrible, awesomeness of that vast, gluttonous unknown. Helen, beautiful dreamlike Helen was gone.

They questioned us, of course, until the newsreel ship dropped in and developed its films, taken with a telescopic camera and showing. the tragic scene atop those ageold cliffs.

We, too, viewed those revealing pictures, and again,our hearts raced as we relived those cruel moments.... Dana flung himself suddenly to his feet, staring wild-eyed at the dear figure as it vanished and then he was calling:
"Helen, Helen!" He swung to me, "Oh! God! She's alive! She must be alive ... Didn't you see it?"
"See what?" I asked placatively, fearful of his sanity.
"The City!" he cried. "The city in the distance?"
"I saw nothing," I murmured softly.
"Oh, no! You wouldn't! You're blind ...blind!"
A tremor ran over me at his strange words, and I cursed myself for a superstitious fool. For, you see, I am not blind... and I saw no distant city.

WE RETURNED TO Croydon, tried to take up the usual routine. But Dana could not stand those long, empty days, speeding through the sky with memories riding in every wisp of cloud; nor could he endure the unending condolences of acquaintances; personal and casual. I found him drunken in that little cockney tavern on Throgmorton Street night after hectic night, sitting there half-unconscious with tears in his bloodshot eyes, drinking until he could not stand alone.

I took him home, of course, got him to bed and tried to condition him for flight duty in the morning. Every time it was harder; every day the lines of dissipation grew more apparent on his fine face; every day I prayed as he brought his ship in for a consistently sloppier landing.

And then suddenly he stopped drinking and something came into his eyes which I have never beheld in the eyes of any man save he, a sort of living dream which grew and formed an aura of unreality about him which he could not or would not explain. I had seen him deteriorate from an alert, officious person into a drunkard, now I saw him miraculously transformed into a sober yet irresponsive dreamer whose reflexes seemed almost atrophied, to whom an earthly existence was unreal and undesirable.

Often through those last nights I saw him standing gazing off into the dim reaches of the sky, a soft smile playing on his full lips, a cloudiness in his eyes, and he'd fling out an arm to the eastern horizon and whisper:

"She's alive out there, Chalmers, waiting for me with her strong white arms and her sweet, red lips and her golden hair, Helen. Oh, my God, if I could but go to her - "

In those moments I pitied him and wished that he still drank. You can dismiss a touch of madness in a man's actions and speech when liquor has dulled his brain.

Deeply scientific, almost wholly hypothetical, yet portions of it were nearer to the truth than the author realised:

"...the comet, crashing into the Atlantic. From outside of infinity, out of the postulated minus space, come to rob a portion of the earth of its molecular stability, to shift the orbital electrons and nucleus of each individual atom, eating like a malignant cancer until the positron-electron balance has been regained. The release of a free body of positrons has been proven time and again to cause such a catastrophe. The alien substance of the comet, affected by the present solar bombardment due to unusual sunspot activity, causes the sudden positronic release which characterizes the furious eventide attacks. That a balance will soon be regained is evidenced by the gradual diminution of these attacks."

I had scarcely finished than Dana started out of his chair, his face radiant, his flashing eyes straining out into the night.

"It has come, Chalmers! She has called to me! Helen has called me! It's so easy to see now; transformation is not death - transformation is..."

I waited silently but he seemed to drop his trend of thought. "Three more nights," he murmured, "...and I'm going to her!"

I caught him by the shoulders, frightened by the passionate, low intensity of his voice. "You mean you'll kill yourself -"

"No," he whispered. "It is not death. You wouldn't - couldn't understand; you'd think me mad. Perhaps you think so anyway. It really doesn't matter. Helen is alive out there, she has called to me. The power of mind, telepathy, Chalmers! She's alive and I'm going to her..."

I couldn't laugh at him. I couldn't. He believed so strongly in those mad dreams of his that he cut my very heart out.

SCARCELY AN HOUR later he went out on special night patrol. Whispers of war had been in the air for years, war which would come without warning - a cloud of pursuit, attack and bombing planes darkening the eastward sky. And so it did come - ships winging out or the night, blasting at the Naval Base at D---! Dana patrolling, immersed in his thoughts, failing to read his supersensory instruments which ordinarily would have apprised him of their coming, failing to warn the Air Bases... But my signals went through and the ships of England arose in time and blasted back that mysterious armada and the Empire was safe again.

In time of war failures such as Dana Coombes' arouse a nation to fury heat. And with the threat of the comet dimming in significance, those relieved hearts unleashed on him the pent-up emotions within. Public indignation demanded his immediate dismissal from the force, exile; or death! The court martial was rushed through, and two days later Dana was cashiered, stripped of his insigna, and left in the streets of Croydon, a forgotten and a ruined man.

"Goodbye, Chalmers. Tonight I go to join Helen. Don't try to stop me; I've told you the truth. She's alive and I have but to cross to her up there at the junction on Land's End. - Dana."

Junction; - junction to what?

I went. A deep, burning urge inside me drove me back to my ship, swept me towards those shores near which that dying mystery slumbered.

CLOSE TO THE north of Whitesand Bay the sheer side of a sundered mountain rises harshly from the white-foaming breakers, topped with a rolling sweep of verdant greenery. Diving low over the upland, I gunned my motor when I saw a man standing; head bowed, close to the cliff's edge. He did not raise his head nor signal so I wheeled about and landed in an open field a kilometer away.

Eventide was fast falling as I finally drew near and called out to him. Yet he did not answer and I burst into a frantic run, calling out repeatedly. I could hear the waves pounding and the winds whispering a dulcet accompaniment to the savage rhythm of my bursting heart.

But now there was the faintest suggestion of movement and Dana was stepping forward to the very verge of the cliff and of a sudden the shadow of the hills flowed from the empty night, out of a mist into weird semi-solidity and far off I saw or thought I saw skyflung towers and wondrous beauties of a glorious, mystic city star-spangled in nocturnal splendour, and here - here close before me a woman stood as in a misty dream plane, her white arms outstretched, and Dana was stepping forward, out past the verge of the cliff unto its vague continuation.

I saw two meet and greet and turn as one to vanish into night and nothingness. And I saw also the phantom shadow of an insubstantial body falling, turning over and over, dropping into the grinding, boiling surf beneath the cliffs.

I'm wondering if Dana Coombes does not live on in another semi-physical essence in that other extra-dimensional world which I so dimly saw? If somehow his body were not wrenched into a dual existance by the microcosmic forces separating that lost world from this, one part to live, the other to die? I remember his strange words: "Transformation is not death - transformation is -" . . IS WHAT. .?

THE 'SCIENCE-FICTION ASSOCIATION' EXECUTIVE REPORT AND NOTES WAS NOT READY FOR THIS ISSUE, AND WILL BE CIRCULARISED TO MEMBERS LATER IN THE MONTH IN THE FORM OF A GAZETTE. FULL DETAILS OF THE FORTHCOMING CONVENTION WILL BE INCLUDED.

Some folks do not think the cinema is a guide to writing. I feel that it is, insofar that it reflects human interest to a great extent. Horror films have come back; this is not an unfortunate move insofar that they will pave the way for the s-f film wave that may possibly follow the recent "War of the Worlds", radio panic.

The humanized science film will come in time, but it is up to us to the writers to make it so. We can only do it by taking some as yet undeveloped angle and building up on it. There are dozens of them, but naturally I keep some of them to myself for future use. My main. concern is in being mysterious.

But, even so, consider these possibilities, as I have done. Up to now we have the ordinary space travel tale as a rule. What would happen if we did away (in a yarn) with the casual way of crossing space that usually happens and replaced it with an interplanetary mail service - like the battles of the early pioneers to get the mail stage coaches through bandit hordes? We'd have a rip-snorting yarn. Or if we had a space ship like the Mayo composite plane - a little space ship on top of the big one to carry fuel. Suppose the little ship heated with solar radiation and was in danger of exploding? More drama! Or what of the man of the future who will carry deadly rocket explosives between worlds for fuelling purposes. The slightest jar would blow them to infinity. Is there drama there? I guess so...

Those are snatches of fragmentery thought, but they might form a story for somebody. The pioneering spirit is not developed strongly in s-f yarns (in the yarns themselves I mean). Too much, I think, is taken for granted. Sometimes it has to be to get on with the yarn - but in those trifling incidents, which have never been dealt with thoroughly, there lie numberless novelettes of tremendous potententiality.

Here are some more random ideas. Suppose there were a Sphinx found in the Martian desert identical to the one on Earth? What's the tie up? A webwork mystery after my own heart. I know the answer to this one but I haven't worked it out yet. Suppose - and do what you like with these ideas, you writers - it were decided to form a trans-spacial observatory between here and Mars? Would there be graft and corruption in high places? I'll say! Or suppose Earth decided to colonise Mars properly and fit it out with atmosphere, roads, travel and whatnot? Would there be the garish life of, say, the type shown us in "In Old Chicago" or "San Francisco", with space men instead of gold prospectors (or whatever they were), and with Martian elemental effects instead of fires and earthquakes.

Well, so it goes on--but the infinity of plots in s-f is truly infinite. Good hunting, you writers - and here's to hoping you hit on accidental angles that will further the great cause.