He gestured again. “You see what I’m getting at, Jeff? Our oceans are receding. The volume of water in them, compared to the volume of the earth, is very small. It is receding--vanishing. But where could it go? The last geodetic survey, Jeff, was startling. It helped to show enormous errors in several physical facts about the earth which for a century have been accepted as true. Yet, for twenty years now, astronomers and physicists have known that the calculated density of our earth does not check, within the limits of a tremendous probable error, with the earth’s volume, or its mass, or its gravitational force. “Something is wrong. All the figures, when one set of calculations is checked against another, seem wrong. We know it. And, as I pointed out to them in London last week--with present-day facts to prove it--the Granthin-Morley theories of 1960, scoffed at as they were, hit the truth. If our earth were a wholly solid globe, or nearly so as we have chosen to consider it, with a liquid core of molten rock perhaps--if it were that, with the volume as we know it to be, its total mass would be far greater than our figures show. But the mass we know to be a true figure. The calculated total volume is correct. The gravitational force cannot be questioned. What then is wrong? The density! One-tenth of our globe’s volume, at the very least, must be empty space! A honeycomb perhaps.” Dr. Plantet sat up abruptly. “Jeff, there is in Holland a fellow named De Boer. He is, I think, the most eminent geologist we have to-day. He stood up last week and told them that our outer core, from the surface of the earth to a depth of a hundred miles, must be honeycombed. And Dr. Jaeger, of the Hawaiian Research Bureau of Vulcanology, supported him. Ah, now you are beginning to understand, Jeff!” * * * * * I was, indeed! This thing, so strange! Yet so logical, inevitable, that I could wonder how in all these æons of our earth’s history it had never happened before. I ventured, “The oceans are receding--” “Yes. Not a question of tides--no tiny disturbed fluctuations. A general receding. There are nearly ten fathoms gone now--half of it within the last week. Pearl Harbor is nearly empty, since you left it! A narrow channel, nothing more. Did you get a look at New York harbor? And here at our feet--The whole world is wondering, Jeff. But they are keeping it off the air, and out of the newsprints. The people think--most of those who have the intelligence to think at all--that it must be local. These crazy tides!” He waved away that angle of it with a gesture. “Where is the water going? We do not know, but we can imagine. This tissue paper layer of water is receding doubtless into the vast honeycombed interior of our hundred-mile core. They’ll say, ‘Why, this is very strange. It never happened before, why should it happen now?’”