The Blue Peril

“A Blue Threat!” Those words have been heard in the conversations of the people of the mountains of southeastern France since spring 1912. Legendary invisible ghosts, known as “sar­vans” in the local dialect, kidnap people right from their homes. They steal more than just people—though that’s not the most important part. The important thing is that at an altitude of fifty kilometers, unreachable for people of that time, a platform is visible to the naked eye. From it, the inhabitants of the stratosphere conduct research on the “bottom” of the air ocean—our Earth. As one of the sarvans’ captives puts it, this is the aerium, where beings from the vacuum collect a museum of everything found at the bottom of the atmosphere. The world society sinks into horror and curiosity, and only the sarvans themselves can rein in their insatiable thirst for knowledge before it leads to war between them and people.